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Comment by wokwokwok | Hacker News Reader

I dunno.

Is having a database that happens to be a product you sell as part of your runtime good, or are you creating some mixed incentives here?

Are you a database vendor now?

If not, don’t build a database.

If this is a mature product that someone else is looking after, and it’s good and free and we’ll maintained like redis or SQLite, sure.

…but it seems like building cloud databases is not the core competency of a group building a javascript runtime.

Once money is involved, it’ll either be a distraction from their core mission, or become their core mission.

A KV db you can use for quick hacks? Sure. Awesome!

A scalable production database you’re selling to people? O_o why are you doing that?

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Deno Inc. has two core products: The free Deno runtime and the for-profit Deno Deploy, a Deno hosting service with 35 locations around the world. The question that often popped up was where to store data. Deno Inc. provided several guides to connect to different cloud services. But they want the friction reduced to a simple `await Deno.openKv()`.

Deno Inc. has enough expertise in running a global service that two other companies rely on their work to offer edge functions to their customers (Netlify and Supabase). Adding a database to the service makes sense. And to be clear, they don’t develop a brand new database. They build atop of SQLite and FoundationDB.

> The question that often popped up was where to store data. Deno Inc. provided several guides to connect to different cloud services.

Sure.

> But they want the friction reduced to a simple `await Deno.openKv()`.

Do “they”?

If so, who’s using it to solve that problem? …because it seems the big uses of deno deploy are not using it, fine with that and it’s pretty unclear who the “they” is in this circumstance.

Still, if it’s a thin layer over foundation db or some other established database product and this is just part of the lock-in for their cloud offering, fair enough.

It’s not like others (eg firebase) don’t do the same thing.

The messaging “we’re building a database” and “we’re offering a hosted database service based on existing mature reliable technology” are different things though.

The latter all cloud vendors do.

The former is ridiculous, and it really really wasn’t clear that wasn’t what was happening.

"They" in OP's post is referring to Deno Land Inc.

I think this kind of "batteries included" approach is interesting. My feeling is that in many cases we spend way too much time when building our platforms from various bits and pieces. Some apps and businesses would get huge productivity boost by using more opinionated platform.

Not saying this is for everything and everyone, but there's so much competition on this space that I can understand why somebody would like to try something different.

They need this because Deno Deploy (their Edge platform) is not a normal/traditional deployment target.

If Deno were nothing but "Deno CLI" (the equivalent of the 'node' executable, that runs as a typical server process on a Unix box) then you would be right. But there are two separate Deno runtimes (CLI and Deploy).

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