The interesting thing is "serverless" batch processing. Amazon have essentially reinvented the 1970s mainframe batch processing business model, complete with charging for CPU usage. And made it fairly readily available for any developer anywhere.
The goal being the utility model of computing, pay for exactly the cycles you use, no more, no less. Off premise on demand. Like tap water.
Data traffic is already measured and priced accordingly in AWS so that's not something new for Lambda.
(It's totally understandable and fair that it does; it's just different than what he asked.)
Mainframe budgeting of cycles, memory, an IO was highly effective and efficiently utilizing resources. It's a model of computation that has disappeared, but is still relevant. When google app engine first came I had hoped it would utilize this model, but instead went the containerization route.
Why Sqlite? It's really an awesome database, and using it in process from apache, we can achieve truly massive multi-tenancy, and really low cost.
We also have static file hosting, we're going for hosting of single page apps, but the database API is available over CORS for any domain.
Out of the gate our users get a subdomain on our site. But to serve webapps from a custom domain (ie www.mysite.com), or access the database API from CORS from a different domain, our tentative plan is to charge a small monthly fee (less than $10 a month) and remove the rate limit.
Yes, DDOS mostly, rate limiting is quite trivial.
We've built a tool called panic (https://github.com/gundb/panic-server) to test stuff like this, however correct we haven't finished integrating all the pieces.
Yeah, shoot me a message ( mark AT gunDB DOT io ) now, and I'll send you a ping when we're testing that stuff. :) Thanks for the feedback!