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Comment by Rauchg | Hacker News Reader

Most databases are quite unfit for the serverless world that's becoming a reality, where the needs shift towards global replication, flexible horizontal scalability (sharding) and vertical (provisioned QPS).

We like and use CosmosDB because it fits this criteria. We anticipate that Google Spanner, CockroachDB and similar databases will become the go-tos in combination with ZEIT Now.

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So what do most of your current customers do for data storage? I mean, I doubt they all use CosmosDB? (simply because it's not particularly mainstream)

We don't have insight on what our customer's use mostly.

We use existing technologies. Anyone can use any cloud Database service. We've datacenters on San Fransisco and in Belgium. So, based on those users can choose where they need to deploy their DBs.

Usually we recommend to configure databases via env variables. Users can also use our [now secrets](https://zeit.co/docs/getting-started/secrets) service as well to avoid hard-coding secrets.

You are going find most people still are using Master-Slave databases at some central datacenter.

Spanned databases are great, but most of the time performance is not there (It's getting there, but it needs to be there for a year before people start to care)

Frankly I blame the SQL DBs for the rise of NoSQL. They didn't move fast enough for this kind of environment, and stuff like Cassandra fit that need pretty well.

That's an divisive statement. I'd blame people who were unwilling to invest the time in properly modelling their data on the rise of NoSQL.

Transactional consistency and data normalisation - pffft.

SQL is still doing very well running things behind the scenes.

The problem is not data modelling. The problem is ensuring eventual consistency and synchronization of data in multiple datacenters around the world.

Talking about running things behind the scenes, mainframes with pre-SQL NoSQL DBs (ADABAS, IBM IMS) and even with no DBMS in a modern sense at all (running on TPF, working directly with Direct Access Storage Device records) are still doing very well.

And fauna

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