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A colleague keeps reminding me that in the end, if you don't need ACID, you can just use S3 as a key-value database and never pay more than pennies a month (and you get infinite scaling). Just depends if you need a db just for a few minor use cases or the app fundamentally depends on it

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Agree. Except I would keep in mind that AWS data egress is very expensive, so if there is any heavy media involved, you would also want to put a CDN in front of s3 with proper caching or you could find yourself with a hell of a bill from AWS.

So if you are serving up just a few megabytes and hit a few million page views you may find an AWS bill for a few thousand dollars.

See https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/optimizing-p... for more specific guidelines on S3 scaling. It used to be you had to be careful and use randomized prefixes... It looks like that might no longer be the case. Also note there is a limit (arguably pretty high) per prefix on request rates.

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