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Transactional Object Storage?

I was frustrated by the gap between stateless and stateful applications in the cloud. While I could easily spin up a stateless application as a “serverless” function in any major cloud provider and pretty much forget about it, persisting data between requests was a game of pick two among three: cheap, strongly consistent, portable. Could I solve portability and lack of transactions myself with a single client-side solution? I thought it would be possible through object storage (e.g. AWS S3), which is strongly consistent, ubiquitous and cheap.

While I could easily spin up a stateless application as a “serverless” function in any major cloud provider and pretty much forget about it, persisting data between requests was a game of pick two among three: cheap, strongly consistent, portable. In practice, because of the way rate limiting is implemented (tokens are checked and reset every minute), GCS allows short bursts of requests to go faster, with penalties coming afterward. King of the pack in terms of isolation is Spanner – which is Strict Serializable – meaning that transactions run as if they were serially executed, and they follow the real time order globally.

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