- Easy to set up, only have to consider local file permissions
- Easy to implement in an ad-hoc way, ideal for a prototype
- Plain text for very simple things like a list
- JSON/YAML/Perl for complex data structures
- Doesn't work when the app is load balanced across multiple servers
- Not automatically backed up
- Amazon S3 is relatively expensive
- Have to make your own model
Database
- Requires up-front schema design - more work, but forces you to consider design of data
- You can put business logic in the ResultSet models
- Requires an instance to be provisioned
- Easy cross-referencing of data
- Works when the app is load balanced across multiple servers
- Backup-as-a-service (i.e. replication)
- Amazon RDS is cheaper than S3
- Get the model for free with ORM
Conclusion
For production services that have redundancy (load balanced), always use a database unless the overhead of setting one up for the first time is considered too high for the business.
Posts
