Scaling to millions of users with Google Sheets as a back end

&gt; Even now, one of our most trafficked services today still has a single node.js instance serving 60K requests per hour (topic for another blog post).<p>So 60k per hour is 1k per minute is 16 per second. That is... not that much? Certainly not really blog post material.

This seems like 5 years down the road this is going to turn into a horror story on HN, about &quot;I went to this customer, and they had been running their entire company database on a single Google Sheet, and now are panicking because the secretary accidentally just deleted everyone from pay roll.&quot;

As a side note: it&#x27;s nearly impossible to upgrade to a higher Sheets API rate limit.<p>We tried it all: options in Cloud Console, speaking with support, talking to sales reps. Google simply doesn&#x27;t want that money and doesn&#x27;t care if you are hitting limits and want to upgrade.

Is Google Sheets designed for this sort of usage? I would have been worried about hitting some undisclosed limits with the service.<p>A single dedicated server is not that big of an expense either. The site probably could even run on a single high end server as it is now? I guess I wouldn&#x27;t have considered using something like Sheets given that. Neat idea though.

I guess I&#x27;m confused, if you&#x27;re already running Cloudfront, API Gateway, and lambdas, why you&#x27;d bother to make API calls out to Sheets rather than just plunking down a simple DynamoDB? Maybe the data access patterns are more complicated than I&#x27;m thinking, or just to capture the built in Forms -&gt; Sheets data entry flow?

I’d love to see some screenshots of the site back in the early days.

I wonder why json over csv? csv should be a natural for sheets.<p>Plus you&#x27;d be able to cache them and use diff+patch for quicker updates when reading.

Great writeup, especially the diagrams. v0&#x27;s manual update handling may seem like anathema to engineers, but is perfect for navigating product&#x2F;market fit.<p>Though, now that I think about it, things like AirTable do the database thing better than Sheets does WRT being an app backend.

So when they say they&#x27;re running without a server it means they are running on Google servers? I thought serverless meant.. no servers