[Reubend]

Stupid question: I was under the impression that object storage was super expensive compared to "normal" SSDs if the QPS numbers got high.

Is that not the case for DBs based on object storage because they cache data before sending it to the object storage? Or because they do some other processing on the DB server before it hits storage?

[rohanpdes]

Not stupid at all. API cost (especially for writes) is indeed one of the main challenges of building for object storage. DBs mitigate this by aggressively caching reads and batching writes. There's a fundamental latency/cost tradeoff here - you accept higher latency to get enough batching to amortize PUT costs. This is a very reasonable tradeoff for search systems which typically aren't as latency sensitive.