[techspert]

Cheap in only the most puerile sense - the complexity and availability foists a particular cost on HBase that is just too high for most people.

[gamapuna]

Maybe you are correct, Hbase is not easy to configure for sure but in terms of scalability (sheer number of row keys you can dump) there are not a lot of other components which can compete.

Although theoretically this abstraction can live on top of any backend which has facilities for fast prefix scans.