A practical tour of GeoServer 3 covering upgrade steps, new requirements, refreshed UI, and updated module structure.

Learn what’s changed, what remains familiar, and how to transition from GeoServer 2.x efficiently, with a focus on real-world adoption and getting up to speed quickly.

GeoServer 3 introduces a modernized foundation while maintaining the familiar concepts and workflows that users rely on. This session offers a guided tour of the new release, focusing on what has changed in practice and how to approach the transition from GeoServer 2.x.

We’ll walk through the upgrade process, highlighting prerequisites such as updated Java and servlet container requirements, and what to expect when migrating existing installations. The session will also showcase the refreshed user interface, discussing its evolution and the improvements it brings in terms of usability and productivity.

In addition, we’ll explore the updated module structure, what is included in the core distribution, and how extensions are organized in GeoServer 3. Rather than covering every detail, the goal is to provide an overview of the new system and help users quickly get up to speed.

Join us for a practical overview of GeoServer 3, designed to make adoption straightforward and predictable for both new and existing users.

GeoServer 3 marks the completion of a long-planned modernization effort aimed at keeping the project aligned with the current Java ecosystem, while preserving the stability and backwards compatibility that users rely on. Now that GeoServer 3 has been available for a few months, this session provides a final update on the work and its outcomes.

We’ll revisit the initial drivers behind the transition, starting from the upgrade of core dependencies, how that cascaded to more updates, resulting in a coordinated effort across multiple projects. From there, we’ll outline the main phases of the work: how the upgrade was organized, funded, managed new needs, and ultimately delivered.

The talk focuses on the process and its results: what it took to modernize a mature codebase while maintaining a high degree of compatibility, the challenges encountered along the way, and how they were addressed. We’ll also share early feedback from adoption and what users can expect when moving to GeoServer 3.

Join us for a practical retrospective on the transition to GeoServer 3, and a discussion of how the project continues to evolve while staying true to its core principles.

The OGC APIs are a fresh take at doing geo-spatial APIs, based on WEB API concepts and modern formats, including:

• Small core with basic functionality, extra functionality provided by extensions
• OpenAPI/RESTful based
• JSON first, while still allowing to provide data in other formats
• No mandate to publish schemas for data
• Improved support for data tiles (e.g., vector tiles)
• Specialized APIs in addition to general ones (e.g., DAPA vs OGC API - Processes)
• Full blown services, building blocks, and ease of extensibility

This presentation will provide an introduction to various OGC APIs and extensions, such as Features, Styles, Maps and Tiles, Processes, STAC and CQL2 filtering. Some of specs are finalized and complete enough that they have a GeoServer supported extensions, while others are provided as community modules. Join us to find out the current state of implementation, our future steps, and how you can participate in it.

The volume of data to be processed and published continues to grow rapidly, particularly in domains such as maritime monitoring, where continuous streams of AIS data must be ingested, processed, and visualized. At the same time, the infrastructure, technologies, and methodologies required to manage these data streams are steadily advancing and maturing. GeoServer, an open-source web service for publishing geospatial data, supports industry standards for vector, raster, and map delivery, and is widely used by organizations to disseminate geospatial information at scale.

In this work, we integrated GeoServer with established big data technologies, including Apache Kafka and Databricks, deploying the solution on Microsoft Azure. The resulting architecture is designed to support demanding maritime use cases, enabling near real-time visualization of incoming AIS data while also supporting large-scale batch processing and analysis of historical datasets.

This presentation describes the system architecture and the key challenges addressed by GeoSolutions in publishing high-volume, high-velocity data through GeoServer’s OGC services (WMS, WFS, and WPS). Particular attention is given to achieving an effective balance between data ingestion throughput and visualization performance. The solution integrates with a streaming processing platform responsible for ingesting, transforming, and storing data in an Azure Data Lake, allowing GeoServer to efficiently query the most recent features while enforcing complex authorization policies. To meet these requirements, several custom GeoServer extensions were developed, addressing advanced authorization scenarios, specialized styling needs for maritime data, and seamless integration with big data platforms.

The presentation will provide a comprehensive introduction to GeoServer’s authentication and authorization subsystems. The authentication section will cover the supported protocols (e.g., Basic/Digest authentication) and identity providers (such as local configuration files, databases, LDAP servers, and OAuth2/OpenID Connect), including scenarios where the same source may fulfill both roles.

It will explain how to combine multiple authentication mechanisms into a unified and coherent security framework, and will present examples of custom authentication plugins for GeoServer, enabling integration with bespoke security architectures. The presentation will then address authorization, describing GeoServer’s pluggable authorization model and comparing it with external proxy-based solutions. The default service and data security system will also be examined, highlighting its strengths and limitations.

Finally, we will explore the advanced authorization provider, GeoFence. The various levels of integration with GeoServer will be presented, ranging from simple, seamless direct integration to more sophisticated external deployments. We will conclude by showcasing GeoFence’s powerful authorization capabilities, including:

• User- and role-based access control
• OGC service, workspace, layer, and layer group restrictions
• CQL read and write filters
• Attribute-level security
• Spatial filtering of raster and vector data based on areas of interest

Never before has such a vast and diverse collection of satellite imagery been available to both organizations and the general public. With missions such as Landsat 8 and Sentinel, the rapid growth of CubeSats, and the open availability of global datasets through programs like the European Copernicus initiative—alongside data captured by drones—we are now experiencing an unprecedented influx of Earth observation data.

Effectively managing, discovering, and visualizing this volume of imagery presents significant challenges. This presentation explores how GeoServer addresses these challenges through real-world use cases, including:

• Indexing and discovery of imagery using OpenSearch for EO and STAC protocols
• Efficient and cost-effective management of large datasets with Cloud Optimized GeoTIFFs (COGs)
• Visualization of image mosaics and creation of composites with flexible filtering and stacking strategies (e.g., most recent, least cloudy, or custom ordering)
• Extraction of imagery at varying scales using WCS and WPS protocols
• Generation and visualization of time-based animations over selected periods
• Execution of band algebra operations using Jiffle

Join this session for an overview of the latest GeoServer capabilities in the Earth Observation domain.

Setting up GeoServer can be deceptively simple. Bringing it into production—stable, performant, and capable of handling real-world traffic—is a different challenge. This talk distills hands-on lessons from enterprise GeoServer deployments into a practical playbook, covering the full journey from initial setup to a production-ready service, including modern cloud-native approaches such as GeoServer Cloud.

We explore the configuration decisions that matter most in production: selecting output formats to avoid network bottlenecks, preparing vector and raster data for the multi-resolution demands of web GIS, and tuning SLD styling to balance visual quality with rendering performance. We then move to caching strategies, demonstrating how to configure GeoWebCache effectively for background layers, and how to identify scenarios where caching can be counterproductive.

Service limits, the control-flow extension, and the monitoring extension are presented as key operational tools for maintaining stability under real user load—helping identify slow requests, resource-intensive clients, and the services and layers that require closer attention. JVM sizing and container configuration are addressed at a practical level, focusing on actionable guidance rather than theory, with notes on how these considerations evolve in containerized and cloud-based deployments.

The session concludes with real-world examples from enterprise deployments carried out by the speaker and colleagues at GeoSolutions, spanning government SDIs, environmental monitoring platforms, and large-scale humanitarian mapping systems. For each scenario, we highlight the configuration choices and tuning strategies that made a measurable difference: which caching approaches were adopted and why, how service limits were aligned with actual client behavior, and how load testing validated each improvement prior to go-live. Attendees will leave with concrete patterns they can immediately apply to their own installations.

This presentation explores GeoServer’s capabilities for publishing rich data models, including complex features with nested properties and multi-valued relationships, through standard OGC services and OGC API - Features. It focuses on recent developments such as the Smart Data Loader and Feature Templating extensions, highlighting both current capabilities and ongoing and planned enhancements within the GeoServer ecosystem.

GeoServer already provides strong support for implementing view and download services for complex data models through its core architecture and a range of free and open-source extensions. Among these, App-Schema has long been the primary solution for modeling and exposing complex feature structures and enabling advanced vector data services, despite its steep learning curve.

Building on these foundations, newer approaches are emerging to simplify and modernize the publication of rich data models. These include direct integration with NoSQL data sources such as MongoDB, leveraging their native document-oriented structures, as well as support for modern output formats like JSON-LD, which enables the embedding of explicit semantics alongside the data.

The session will conclude with real-world use cases from organizations that have adopted GeoServer and GeoSolutions solutions, providing practical insights, architectural patterns, and lessons learned to help attendees effectively design and implement scalable, production-ready services for complex data models.

The growing availability of data from drones, Earth observation, and agricultural machinery (i.e., telemetry), combined with the advent of cloud infrastructure, has significantly accelerated innovation in how farmers and agricultural systems are supported. These advances have democratized access to data and capabilities, enabling precision farming solutions at an unprecedented scale.

This has become one of the main use cases for GeoServer deployments in recent years. At GeoSolutions, we have collaborated with a wide range of clients—from NGOs to large private companies, from startups to research institutions, helping them to extract value from data through GeoServer and other open-source geospatial technologies deployed at scale in cloud environments.

This presentation summarizes 10 years of experience in ingesting, managing, and disseminating data at scale for the precision farming industry. Key topics include:

• Optimization and organization of raster data
• Optimization and organization of vector data
• Data modeling for performance and scalability in GeoServer and PostGIS
• Deployment guidelines for scaling and performance of GeoServer
• On-the-fly styling for NDVI and other visualizations

By the end of the presentation, attendees will be able to design and plan GeoServer deployments to efficiently serve precision farming data at scale.