[abd12]

In a nutshell:

- It was designed for super high scale use cases (think Amazon.com retail on Cyber Monday). It has decent adoption there. Competes mostly with Cassandra or other similar tools.

- With the introduction of AWS Lambda, it got more adoption in the 'serverless' ecosystem because of how well its connection model, provisioning model, and billing model works with Lambda. RDBMS doesn't work as well here.

A lot of people find 'problems' with it because they try to use it like a relational database, which it most certainly isn't. You have to model differently and think about it differently. The book helps here :).