Three HN projects ditch the database for S3

Three unrelated backend projects hit Hacker News's front page within nine hours of each other on August 24. Each one skips the database and the local disk, running its whole backend on object storage instead.

GitHub, Confluent and Dropbox charge for keeping writes consistent on top of a blob store. All three projects are betting they can fake that layer themselves, for free, on S3.

Walgit packs a Git server into one binary that keeps the whole repository in S3 or GCS. It drops the local disk and replication a git server usually needs, and got 109 points.

PicoMQ runs durable, real-time message streams over HTTP using only S3-compatible storage. It drops the broker cluster Confluent would run for durability, and got 138 points.

Bookshelf is a self-hosted ebook library that stores its catalog in a bucket instead of a local filesystem. It drops the database a typical self-hosted library needs, and got 118 points.

Whether this holds up depends on concurrent writes. A git push conflicting with another, or two clients appending to the same PicoMQ stream, is where coordination on object storage tends to break down. None of the three posts say how they handle that case. That gap decides whether this is a real shift in what counts as infrastructure, or three weekend builds that work until they don't.