Honua 2026.1 Release Candidate.

What the Release Candidate is.

Honua is a geospatial platform for AI agents and people working on the same data: Honua Server, SDKs for JavaScript, Python and .NET, an MCP server for agents, and Honua Studio for AI-assisted map making.

One server serves PostGIS-backed data through GeoServices REST, the OGC APIs, WMS, WFS, WMTS and WCS, STAC, OData and vector tiles. Honua Server is Fair Source under FCL-1.0-ALv2; the SDKs, Console and Studio are Apache-2.0.

Use the Release Candidate to evaluate Honua and run pilots. The GA commitments below apply from the GA release. The GA release record lists the qualification evidence collected for that candidate.

GA, Preview and Experimental.

GA: Docker Compose and AWS ECS deployments, with the protocol surfaces, SDKs and Console listed in the release notes.

Preview: the Helm chart on Amazon EKS and other Kubernetes distributions, AWS Lambda, the geoprocessing (GP) catalog and Honua Studio, along with realtime and geofence alerting, offline sync, OGC API EDR, OGC SensorThings and branch versioning. Preview surfaces ship in the release and are documented. Their functional results do not gate the release, and they may change. Security, isolation and integrity checks still apply to them.

Experimental: 3D Tiles scenes, CityGML/BIM and point-cloud ingest, I3S, the mobile SDK and Honua Collect.

Every supported 2026.1 deployment is single-tenant and runs on x86_64.

Supported SDK versions.

• JavaScript and TypeScript: @honua/sdk-js 0.2.10 ↗
• Python: honua-sdk 0.1.19 ↗
• .NET (net10.0): Honua.Sdk 1.12.0 ↗

The .NET SDK has no OGC API Tiles client in 2026.1. The server's Tiles endpoints work the same for every client, and .NET applications can call them over HTTP.

Known issues.

• Throughput is lower than earlier pre-release builds. A security fix removed a blanket 60-second cache that answered anonymous reads, so every request now reaches the database. The Release Candidate sustains about 376 requests per second on four CPUs, and the capacity envelope is re-frozen at 357 with the latency bounds unchanged (capacity envelope ↗). A vector tile whose encoded size would exceed the tile budget, typical of a dense layer at zoom 0–2, is refused with 413 and a problem document. Performance and opt-in response caching follow in 2026.1.x.
• The server's capability catalog still labels the GP catalog GA. Its 2026.1 tier is Preview, as this page says. The label fix (honua-server#6700 ↗) landed after the Release Candidate was cut and ships in the next candidate.
• Preview surfaces. Helm, AWS Lambda, the GP catalog and Studio are in the Release Candidate but do not gate it. Report problems as issues; these surfaces may change before GA. On the Release Candidate, Helm on Amazon EKS and AWS Lambda with AWS Batch passed the release journey with and without Redis; the issues below apply to them. The AWS deployments are qualified with the honua-iac v0.4.6 Terraform modules.
• An AWS Lambda instance that starts before the database is migrated stays unready. The API function and the control-plane event functions keep returning 503 until AWS recycles the instance (honua-server#6750 ↗). The server fix ships in the next candidate. Until then, use the serving_closed input of the honua-iac aws-serverless root: apply with serving_closed = true, migrate, then apply again with false.
• AWS Lambda without Redis can briefly return 404 for a service that was just published. Each instance keeps its own catalog snapshot, so a request served by another instance may not see the new service until that snapshot refreshes. Retry the read, or run Lambda with Redis (honua-server#6762 ↗).
• AWS Lambda with Redis can fail requests under bursts of new instances. A request served by an instance that was frozen for a few minutes can fail once with 500 while it reconnects to Redis (honua-server#6753 ↗). Each instance holds a database connection for leader election, so a burst of a few dozen new instances can exhaust a small RDS Proxy pool, and some requests time out (honua-server#6760 ↗). Both are fixed in the next server candidate. Until then, size the database for your expected instance count, or run Lambda without Redis. honua-iac v0.4.6 turns off the server's automatic query cache behind RDS Proxy and adds rds_proxy_idle_client_timeout_seconds; a short value releases connections held by frozen instances sooner.
• Helm GP job workers receive the server's full secret set. With the chart's default geoprocessing.kubernetesJobs.envFromServer, each GP job worker imports the server's runtime Secret and ConfigMap, including the admin password and the audit-chain key, and on EKS the GP job role can read the same secrets as the server. Scoping the worker environment is a GA item (honua-helm#110 ↗).
• The GP catalog's lifecycle and resilience qualification has not run on this Release Candidate. It needs a native GDAL worker image built at the candidate commit, which the worker build cannot produce yet (honua-server#6752 ↗). The Release Candidate's GP evidence is the candidate's GP test suites and GP jobs executed with verified results on AWS ECS, on AWS Batch behind Lambda, and in the agent journey. Full qualification is a GA gate.
• Two .NET certification cells are declared blocked. OGC API Tiles through Honua.Sdk has no client (honua-sdk-dotnet#405 ↗), and published-SDK service-layer import fidelity has no evidence producer yet (honua-release#418 ↗). Both are targeted at 2026.1.x.

Known limitations that are not specific to the Release Candidate are listed in the release notes. Two examples: imported attributes are stored in one JSON properties column until typed columns arrive in 2026.1.x, and WMTS serves WebMercatorQuad only.

Upgrade notes.

Breaking change. API keys granted only admin:write or admin:manage now receive 403 when they create, rotate or revoke API keys, change user roles, deprovision users, or register or delete OAuth clients. They keep read access to those resources. Before you upgrade, move automation that manages credentials to a full-administrator credential or to an approved operation.

Nightly images and earlier pre-release snapshots carry no upgrade guarantee. Take a database backup before moving one to the Release Candidate, and follow the upgrade runbook.