COG—Huh! What is it good for?

Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF (COG) are geotiff files, like satellite imagery, that have been processed in a manner that makes it easy to consume for internet processing applications (read cloud). It is the brainchild of some very smart people at very smart organizations (Amazon, Planet, MapBox, ESRI, USGS and the landsat-pds mailing list) and is supported by major processing software such as ESRI, Rasterio, Geoserver, QGIS and GDAL.