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It’s also an abstraction on top of those servers, that separates your business logic from the underlying architecture to a degree that a lot of people find really appealing.

> but I don't see why - in principle - a "serverless", SQL-over-API-as-a-Service couldn't work.

It can, but there’s just not really any good ones. Where as there are products like Dynamo which are amazing from an operability standpoint (as long as your use case doesn’t run up too hard against any of its constraints). AWS Serverless RDS is pretty terrible for example, the engine choices are limited, the scaling story is terrible, it’s expensive, it doesn’t actually have anything close to the “on-demand” functionality described in the marketing material, and the interface is just a mechanism for passing SQL queries around (so you’d probably want to use yet another abstraction layer for constructing your queries). Spanner is pretty good, but it’s really expensive, and isn’t amazing enough on its own to justify moving to GCP unless you’re already there. You can also run an HTTP interface yourself for you RDBMS, but there isn’t really a mature product in that space. There’s no show stopping technical limitations there, it’s just not a well or widely supported feature.




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