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Comment by paulgb | Hacker News Reader

I wish Amazon or Google would just make a simple key/value store to give minimal persistence for their serverless offerings. DynamoDB comes closest but it still overcomplicates things.

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I'm not super familiar with DynamoDB except as a strict key/value store. You set a partition key, you ignore your range key, and you go--what's particularly overcomplicated about that?

It's been a while since I played around with it but I recall having to increase the number of write nodes to load data at a reasonable rate, then drop the number back down to avoid overpaying. And there were limits on how often you could lower the number of instances so I had to be careful not to reach the limit.

Maybe I'm misremembering or that has changed?

In June this year AWS shipped DynamoDB autoscaling: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-auto-scaling-for-amazon...

Good to know!

Setting the number of write nodes and read nodes to match your workload. I was scaling up a system and as more things came online, the traffic became more bursty we were constantly bumping them up and wondering if we were allocating too much (probably useless fretting regardless).

Ultimately, we moved to an S3 only solution since we have such a low throughput environment and the simplicity is addictive.

Makes sense in the past, but with DynamoDB autoscaling that's largely gone by the wayside.

I hadn't heard about this feature update! Thanks for pointing me at it!

Google Cloud Datastore?

That one is new to me but looks like a winner! Thanks

Worth noting that Google has essentially deprecated Cloud Datastore in favor of Firebase Cloud Firestore. As far as I can tell, its unclear what the exact relationship between these two products is, but if you have a GCP Project which has never used Cloud Datastore but has the Cloud Firestore Beta enabled, you cannot access Cloud Datstore.

FYI, you can use the Datastore API with Firstore, you just don't get the real-time features. Firestore is backwards compatible with Datastore AFAIK.

(I work for GCP)

I wasn't aware. Thanks.

AWS and Azure have fully-managed Redis as an offering.

AWS S3

so...firebase?

When I looked at firebase it seemed like the fact that it's designed for client-side access meant the security model got in the way for the type of stuff I was trying to do (server-side access only)

You can make it authenticated reads only and only give your server authentication. Granted, it's not the primary use case it's trying to support, but it does support it.

The new Firestore database has first-class support for server side SDKs. The real-time database is pretty limited when it comes to server side support, and probably always will be.

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