I'm looking for a framework/library/solution to serve mapnik generated maps with multiple (up to several thousands) of different styles (and potentially different backing stores). Something similar to what they're doing over at Cloudmade or Mapbox with their WYSIWYG styling of maps. All components I've evaluated so far (tilecache, tilestache, renderd, tirex, tilecloud among others) have many delicate features, but most, if not all, are designed to serve a statically configured set of maps (the amount is even set at compile time in renderd) and none of them have hooks/api's etc. to dynamically add or remove maps while running. The solutions based on mod_tile even suffer from the fact that one need to fiddle with the Apache configuration to add a new map.
Any clever solution out there to this problem? Do I need to roll my own stack for this? Mapbox and Cloudmade seem to open source a lot of the work they're doing, but this aspect may be a little bit close to their core business.
We have similar needs, and so far taken the solution of scripting the configuration of renderd, and process restart, using Fabric scripts. This works ok. Though we're looking at which among renderd and tilestache is going to serve us best. renderd has hardcoded limit of 10 maps, which we've changed and recompiled, but I wonder if there's a reason for that. Another limitation is that renderd does not server utfgrid, and I've been looking into adding it, but it's been slow going. TileStache can serve utfgrid, so thinking about switching, at least for grids, and adding configuration steps to our Fabric scripts.