This may be a stupid question but what happens when two users update data in the same block? Also, does every update send an entire block over the wire?
At the very least, you'd have to emulate file locks on the HTTP layer - and deal with the problem of requests being delayed, getting losts, clients suddenly vanishing, etc.
> though i do need to ensure i'm writing from a single thread.
But how would you do that? This being a web app, it's hard to ensure you're even writing from a single machine.
It is the case here. Writes are happening on a normal linux VPS, and subsequently copied to S3. The read-only queries are using the HTTP VFS. It would be incredibly bad to enable direct writes to a db from arbitrary clients.