(Over)Pay As You Go for Your Datastore
As a small startup, you want to move fast and deliver business value quickly. It can be a small proof of concept to verify your product-market fit, or maybe you want to deliver some feature to an existing customer. Building those systems is hard enough as it is, and creating, managing, and configuring the underlying infrastructure and data stores is a burden we’d like to avoid to focus on our business proposition.
“Pay as you go”/“pay on demand”/”pay per use” datastore solutions became a quite popular way to solve those needs. With these options, you’re getting a scalable solution and paying for the used capacity only, while managing it in production and performing ongoing maintenance remains the responsibility of the vendor.
Those solutions are widely adopted and liked, mostly due to the fast ramp-up and onboarding, and the flexibility and scalability of the services.
As a startup, Riskified leveraged (and still uses) these solutions extensively. DynamoDB, in particular, enabled us to scale our business and DEV organization fast while delivering a top-quality experience to our customers. The downside, though, is cost — these solutions tend to be expensive, and in some cases, the promise of “infinite scalability” and elasticity serves to hide fundamental application problems.
