Azavea’s server, Franklin, now supports the latest STAC API

By Nathan Zimmerman, Software Engineer at Azavea

Franklin is an Azavea server that imports and serves STAC catalogs, storing data in Postgres. It allows users to import and query STAC catalogs as simply as possible; “​​from Static Data to a Dynamic API in Minutes.” At Azavea, we are proponents of STAC as it democratizes geospatial information, making it easier to work with, index, and be discovered.

This past month, our team updated Franklin to support the latest STAC API spec as a means to streamline the user experience.

What does it mean for users that Franklin is updated to support the latest STAC API spec?

In this latest deployment, our changes ensure a slim, easy-to-use STAC spec service. This means that less maintenance is required, so the project is better able to remain up-to-date with current offerings while achieving significantly better performance out of the box.

In addition to more streamlined updates, these changes help ensure that all tools and catalogs within the program work with one another.

What did the update change on the back end?

For our team, this update included a lot of code pruning. For reference, we added about half as many lines of code as we deleted. This means that the biggest “feature” included in this deployment is the removal of unnecessary elements that were hindering performance.

In addition to paring down the code, we were able to migrate complex operations to pgSTAC and separate the tile server from the STAC server. Because these two servers use vastly different amounts of resources, separating them pushes us closer to our goal of a sleek and functional service.

Franklin in action

Most recently, our Azavea team has put Franklin to work to make NASA Hyperspectral imagery more accessible through STAC. If you’re interested in learning more, you can dive into our Hyperspectral work here, or watch this recent lightning talk from our CEO, Robert Cheetham, at SatSummit this past September.