I keep seeing this comment on HN, but I never really get it. In the world of platform as a service, launching a database instance is far easier than managing disk based storage yourself. It also has a very obvious route to horizontally scaling the web process. Deployment is easier too with an external database, there's no data on the disk of the machine running the web process that needs to be carried over.
I had the same objection to SQLite, and then I heard about Litestream, and it won me over.[0]
Litestream watches your SQLite database and then streams changes to a cloud storage provider (e.g., S3, Backblaze). You get the performance and simplicity of writing SQLite to the local filesystem, but it's syncing to the cloud. And the cool part is that you don't have to change any of your application code to do it - as far as your app is concerned, it's writing to a local SQLite file.
I wrote a little log uploading utility for my business that uses Litestream, and it's been fantastic.[1] It essentially carries around its data with it, so I can deploy my app to Heroku, blow away the instance and then launch it on fly.io, and it pops up with the exact same data.[2]
I'm currently in the process of rewriting an open-source AppEngine app to use SQLite + Litestream instead of Google Firestore.[2] It's such a relief to get away from all the complexity of GCP and Firestore and get back to simple SQLite.
> launching a database instance is far easier than managing disk based storage yourself
Look, it comes down to what you, the developer are comfortable with. If you know and are comfortable with running something like postgres in the cloud, then go for it.
Some of us prefer to not. Similarly, not all of us nuke the entire filesystem on every deploy :)
