Cloud Native for the Rest of Us

What happens when you take cloud native geospatial out of the satellite-and-petabyte world and drop it into a small city with no budget and the world's slowest internet connection? In this episode, Daniel talks with Nissim Lebovits, a city planner turned geospatial data scientist, about his nine months in Argentina building climate risk tools for under-resourced municipalities. Nissim breaks down what "cloud native" actually means in practice (hint: it's really about ease of access), why range requests let a small city grab 100MB instead of downloading a 20GB file, and how a single spatial join — run in about three seconds — revealed that 3 million people are missing from Argentina's own census data. We also get into open building footprints, why QGIS (not Python) is where the real adoption is happening, the adoption gap holding cloud native geo back from small cities in the Global South, vibe-coding a QGIS plugin to finally make Argentina's census data usable, and where cloud native geo is headed over the next five years. This episode is brought to you by the Cloud Native Geospatial Forum. CNG Forum 2026 runs October 6-9 at Snowbird, Utah — three days of real-world cloud native geospatial (STAC, COGs, GeoParquet, Zarr, and more) plus a hands-on workshop day on the 6th. Register at 2026.cloudnativegeo.org.