[mattrobenolt]

There are, in my opinion, a few other concrete benefits outside of performance too that I didn't touch on. I plan on touching on them more in my follow up blog post though.

A lot of this for me/us at this point is still theoretical since we don't have tons of application yet. Serverless was an easy first target since they require HTTP as the transport. The real experiments will come when we say, put together a Python or Go driver based on these APIs and compare side by side to a native MySQL driver.

[brundolf]

Do you think, if this becomes the norm, that we could start seeing no-backend apps (thick client talking directly to DB)? Maybe with the occasional light worker/lambda

[mattrobenolt]

I'm going to use a big notice here: None of this is inherently safe to use as a client. This is similar security profile as a database driver. This API has no row level auth or anything like that. Unless this is explicitly what your product is doing, like within PlanetScale, this is what powers our Console, don't use this in a browser.

With that said, I personally have no real opinions on this topic. It's pretty far out of my wheelhouse. I think that's more something like Firebase and gang, but that's not something we're gunning for at the moment and aren't trying to replace that.