Apparently, You Can Use Route53 as a Blazingly Fast Database

Exploring the pros and cons, and how it might even be possible

Photo by Jan Huber on Unsplash

Introduction

A few years ago, I stumbled on this wild story from Corey Quinn about how they’ve used Amazon Route53 as a simple database:

Whether it is true or not, it’s impossible to tell, but Corey has often referred to Route53 as their database of choice.

As it turns out, this might be entirely fictitious, according to their blog article, which actually proposes a fairly decent and somewhat viable use case.

Corey also posted this comment on Reddit, which might debunk the Route53-as-a-database myth:

“Holy crap my nonsense got traction. Please don’t take it as a good idea; most of my architectures are intentionally awful for amusement purposes.”