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Cloud-Native Geospatial for Small Teams: How the Utah Geological Survey Did It
What happens when a small, technical team at a state agency decides to go cloud native? They don't have terabytes of satellite imagery. They have lots of small datasets, lots of scientists and lots of people who just want to get at the data.
In this episode, I talk with Marshall Robinson and Clinton Lunn from the Data Management Program at the Utah Geological Survey. They moved from a traditional ArcGIS Server setup to Postgres and GeoServer, and then to a cloud-native pipeline built on GeoParquet, PMTiles, and a STAC catalog.
What I really wanted from this conversation was recipes. Picture a GIS person at a local council (say, here in New Zealand) who's curious about this stuff and needs a proof of concept to take to their manager. Where do they start?
We talk about:
- Why "it's cheaper" isn't a good enough reason to switch, and why it had to work and be better (they still turned off two servers and saved around $25,000 a year)
- Adding things in slowly instead of ripping everything out. Postgres is still their source of truth, and the cloud-native layer is bolted on top
- The "why should I care?" question from data users, and how one layer can be exposed 10 different ways so nobody has to change their workflow
- Using industrial-strength tools on small data, and whether that's worth it
- How new data gets from the field (or the core warehouse) into their public web apps
- New staff who know Python, pointing your favourite LLM at a STAC catalog, and why machines finding your data matters
- Where this is going: Zarr, Icechunk, time-series data and derivative products
The stack: Postgres, DuckDB, dbt, GDAL, GitHub Actions / Cloud Build, GeoParquet in bucket storage, STAC, PMTiles and DuckLake
Their advice if you want to try this: Start small. Tinker locally. Be kind to yourself. Let an agent help you with best practices and documentation. Before building anything yourself, connect to something that already exists (like STAC Index) to see how it works.
This episode is sponsored by The Cloud Native Geospatial Forum 2026
You can register at 2026.cloudnativegeo.org
