Minutely Shortbread tiles
With this year being the year of OpenStreetMap vector maps I've been working on making vector tile maps that update minutely. Most maps don't need minutely updates and are fine with daily or, at most, weekly. Minutely updates on OpenStreetMap.org are a crucial part of the feedback cycle where mappers can see their edits right away and get inspired to map more often. Typically a mapper can make an edit and see their edit when reloading after 90-180 seconds, compared to the days or weeks of most OSM-based services, or the months or years of proprietary data sources.
Updating maps once a week can be done with a simple architecture that takes the OSM file for the planet and turns it into a single file containing all the tiles for the world. This can scale to daily updates, but not much faster. To do minutely updates we need to generate tiles one-by-one, since they change one-by-one.