Kyle Barron

We Needed Better Cloud Storage for Python so We Built Obstore — Development Seed Obstore solves the friction we kept hitting in cloud-native workflows.

New blog post on Obstore, fast, multi-provider cloud storage access for Python:

developmentseed.org/blog/2025-08...

New example notebook on visualizing Spatially-Partitioned GeoParquet with Lonboard, Obstore, and GeoArrow-Rust, using Overture Maps Foundation data! developmentseed.org/lonboard/lat...

When the Delta Lake Python bindings take a required dependency on your library 😅. 2.6M downloads a month! 😱 Guess I'll never be making a breaking release now!! pypistats.org/packages/arr...

arro3-core is 15x smaller in your environment than pyarrow! kylebarron.dev/arro3/latest/

not every decade-old tech post holds up, but this one does: macwright.com/2012/06/13/p...

New York City Apache DataFusion Meetup · Luma Welcome to the New York City Apache DataFusion Meetup! Join us for an evening of talks, panel discussion, and community discussion celebrating 50 releases of…

I'll be speaking at the NYC DataFusion meetup in September on geospatial support for DataFusion! lu.ma/qkcyycg0

DataFusion is a Rust-based query engine for building fast OLAP data processing systems. Compared to DuckDB, DataFusion is more modular and is designed to be embedded in larger systems.

YouTube video by Cloud-Native Geospatial Forum [CNG 2025] Fast Cloud Storage Operations with Obstore – Kyle Barron

🆕 #CNG2025 session recording
@kylebarron.dev from @developmentseed.org introduces Obstore, a python library he wrote to access data on the cloud. Watch his talk to hear about the motivations for writing Obstore & its details
▶️ youtu.be/Wxh1G2oCZiU

Published v0.4 of the Rust GeoParquet crate:

- Read all GeoParquet 1.1 files, including spatial filtering
- Easier integration with upstream parquet crate read options
- Support for adding bbox column when writing files
- Sync and async for both reading and writing

github.com/geoarrow/geo...

✨New Python bindings to GeoArrow and GeoParquet in Rust!

This wrapper exposes a *full rewrite* of the GeoArrow Rust library, including support for the new Geometry(Collection) array types.

It also supports reading and writing GeoParquet files, with spatial filtering.

geoarrow.org/geoarrow-rs/...

Releasing obstore 0.7! - obstore The simplest, highest-throughput Python interface to S3, GCS & Azure Storage, powered by Rust.

Obstore v0.7 is out! The simplest Python cloud storage interface, powered by Rust

- Anonymous connections to GCS
- Obspec compatibility
- Improvements to NASA Earthdata credential provider
- Fixed creation of AzureStore from HTTPS URL
- Improved documentation

developmentseed.org/obstore/late...

Introducing Obspec: A Python protocol for interfacing with object storage - obspec Object storage interface definitions for Python.

Introducing Obspec: A Python protocol for interfacing with object storage

Obspec is an alternative to fsspec. It defines a minimal Python interface to read, write, and modify data on object storage while acknowledging that object storage is *not* a filesystem.

developmentseed.org/obspec/lates...

Lonboard v0.11 is released!

- Choose between a tooltip and side panel for inspecting data
- Supports GeoArrow box arrays from 0.2 spec
- fixes some DuckDB and CSS bugs
- Ensures compatibility with geoarrow-pyarrow v0.2

See full changelog: github.com/developments...

GeoArrow Rust crates - geoarrow-rs A Rust implementation of GeoArrow

Published version 0.4 of the GeoArrow Rust library! It's been fully rewritten from scratch, has a much more stable core, and supports all of the GeoArrow 0.2 specification. geoarrow.org/geoarrow-rs/...

Really excited for version 0.2 of GeoArrow! This has been years in the making and adds:

- Geometry, GeometryCollection, Box types. We can now represent mixed-type geometries in an array
- New ways to represent CRS.

See the release post for more information: geoarrow.org/news/release...

Release GDAL 3.11.0 "Eganville" · OSGeo/gdal The 3.11.0 release is a new feature release with the following highlights: In a nutshell... RFC 104: Adding a "gdal" front-end command line interface. See the list of commands Includes new "gdal ...

GDAL 3.11 released 🚀

github.com/OSGeo/gdal/r...

We found similar results when we first benchmarked #icechunk. Our conclusion: doing IO with a Rust backend is much faster than Python.

👇Really exciting to see @kylebarron.dev's Obstore backend for Zarr-Python ship today.

This benchmarking is done by Max Jones in github.com/maxrjones/za...

With today's Zarr Python release, switch to the new obstore-based backend for **3x faster** reading from S3, Google Cloud Storage, and Azure than the default fsspec backend.

zarr.readthedocs.io/en/stable/us...
developmentseed.org/obstore/late...

Code snippet showing the initial support for M values, illustrating that with a POINT M.

Image showing the functionality of `shapely.coverage_simplify`: on the left the countries of Africa, on the right the result of topologically simplifying those polygons preserving the coverage.

Finally a new #Shapely feature release! 🎉
Shapely 2.1.0 highlights include initial support for geometries with M or ZM values, functionality for coverage validation and simplification, and much more.

For a full overview, see shapely.readthedocs.io/en/latest/re...

#python #geopython #geospatial

I'm looking forward to the Cloud Native Geo conference next month!

I'll be presenting on Obstore and a growing ecosystem of Python libraries that enjoy faster, simpler access to cloud resources.

Releasing obstore 0.6! - obstore The simplest, highest-throughput Python interface to S3, GCS & Azure Storage, powered by Rust.

Obstore v0.6 brings simple, painless integration with Microsoft Planetary Computer!

- *Automatic token refresh*. No need to manually fetch SAS tokens and never think about token expiration times again.
- STAC API integration

developmentseed.org/obstore/late...

GitHub - developmentseed/async-tiff: Async TIFF reader for Rust and Python Async TIFF reader for Rust and Python. Contribute to developmentseed/async-tiff development by creating an account on GitHub.

Published v0.1 of async-tiff, a Rust crate and Python library for low-level, async reading of TIFF and GeoTIFF files.

There's high potential for improved performance when opening many TIFF files concurrently, esp in Python server environments

github.com/developments...

Releasing obstore 0.5! - obstore The simplest, highest-throughput Python interface to S3, GCS & Azure Storage, powered by Rust.

Published obstore 0.5, the fastest Python interface to S3, GCS & Azure

- Benchmarks: *2.8x higher throughput* than aioboto3 for many small, concurrent requests
- Custom credential providers, automatic token refresh
- Improved docs, type hints, fsspec integration

developmentseed.org/obstore/late...

So awesome to see my amazing coworker @batpad.bsky.social having his work featured in the Museum of Modern Art here in NYC!!

A screenshot of the book's website

An image with the publication date: February 14, 2025

🎉 The "Geocomputation with Python" book has been officially published today!

Dive into the world of spatial analysis and geospatial data with Python. 📖🐍

Book's website: https://buff.ly/3NK2uBq

#geocompx #geopython #spatialanalysis

Releasing obstore 0.4! - obstore The simplest, highest-throughput Python interface to S3, GCS & Azure Storage, powered by Rust.

New release of obstore: the simplest, highest-throughput Python interface to S3, GCS & Azure Storage!

- Pickle support, to unblock usage in Dask and Zarr
- Easier one-line store creation
- Open remote objects as file-like readers or writers
- Improved docs

developmentseed.org/obstore/late...

YouTube video by Pangeo High-performance Python STAC tooling, backed by Rust

Really cool to see @gadom.ski 's work integrating Rust-Python for the STAC ecosystem www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdCJ...

Rust NYC Monthly Meetup, Tue, Feb 11, 2025, 6:30 PM | Meetup For our second meetup of 2025, and we have Alex Kesling, a co-founder from Empathic, as our speaker! Come learn how you too can turn anything into a database! What does i

I didn't know anything about this -- Feb 11 there is a Rust NYC meetup feature DataFusion: www.meetup.com/rust-nyc/eve...

listen if you're interested in 🌍 geospatial companies or 💰 the existential weight of attempting to run a business or 👴🏻 my feelings on open source and realtime tech and stuff!

obstore A Python interface and pyo3 integration to the Rust object-store crate.

New obstore v0.3 for easy access to S3, GCS, and Azure Storage!

- Easy **streaming** downloads, uploads, and copies across object stores via async iterators
- Streaming list, with no pagination
- Easier configuration with improved type hints
- Fsspec integration

developmentseed.org/obstore/late...

Really happy for myself and @developmentseed.org to be part of GeoJupyter, an initiative to improve interactive mapping and analysis in @projectjupyter.bsky.social notebooks.

geojupyter.org/blog/2025010...