Scaling to millions of users with Google Sheets as a back end
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Re: Scaling to millions of users with Google Sheets as a back end
#2As a side note: it's nearly impossible to upgrade to a higher Sheets API rate limit.
We tried it all: options in Cloud Console, speaking with support, talking to sales reps. Google simply doesn't want that money and doesn't care if you are hitting limits and want to upgrade.
Re: Scaling to millions of users with Google Sheets as a back end
#3As a side note: it's nearly impossible to upgrade to a higher Sheets API rate limit. We tried it all: options in Cloud Console, speaking with support, talking to sales reps. Google simply doesn't want that money and doesn't care if you are hitting limits and want to upgrade.
Probably because the sheets team doesn't want to be in the database business and there are lots of other Google products that let you use them as a database on purpose?
Re: Scaling to millions of users with Google Sheets as a back end
#4As a side note: it's nearly impossible to upgrade to a higher Sheets API rate limit. We tried it all: options in Cloud Console, speaking with support, talking to sales reps. Google simply doesn't want that money and doesn't care if you are hitting limits and want to upgrade.
I run a Google Sheets-based SaaS. The default limit is 60 write req/user/min and 60 read req/user/min.
In my experience, that's plenty!
Especially so since Sheets has a very advanced API relative to, say, Airtable. For example, you can do atomic updates of multiple sheets in a single request. A single request can contain like 100MB of data. (It'll be very slow, and at this point, a person should question their life choices, but it'll work.)
Re: Scaling to millions of users with Google Sheets as a back end
#5Great writeup, especially the diagrams. v0's manual update handling may seem like anathema to engineers, but is perfect for navigating product/market fit.
Though, now that I think about it, things like AirTable do the database thing better than Sheets does WRT being an app backend.
Re: Scaling to millions of users with Google Sheets as a back end
#6As a side note: it's nearly impossible to upgrade to a higher Sheets API rate limit. We tried it all: options in Cloud Console, speaking with support, talking to sales reps. Google simply doesn't want that money and doesn't care if you are hitting limits and want to upgrade.
I run a Google Sheets-based SaaS. The default limit is 60 write req/user/min and 60 read req/user/min. In my experience, that's plenty! Especially so since Sheets has a very advanced API relative to, say, Airtable. For example, you can do atomic updates of multiple sheets in a single request. A single request can contain like 100MB of data. (It'll be very slow, and at this point, a person should question their life c…
We hit 60 read/write req/user/min pretty fast and yes, theoretically you can scale with the user numbers in GCP and by rotating them.
Re: Scaling to millions of users with Google Sheets as a back end
#7This seems like 5 years down the road this is going to turn into a horror story on HN, about "I went to this customer, and they had been running their entire company database on a single Google Sheet, and now are panicking because the secretary accidentally just deleted everyone from pay roll."
Re: Scaling to millions of users with Google Sheets as a back end
#8> Even now, one of our most trafficked services today still has a single node.js instance serving 60K requests per hour (topic for another blog post).
So 60k per hour is 1k per minute is 16 per second. That is... not that much? Certainly not really blog post material.
Re: Scaling to millions of users with Google Sheets as a back end
#9I wonder why json over csv? csv should be a natural for sheets.
Plus you'd be able to cache them and use diff+patch for quicker updates when reading.
Re: Scaling to millions of users with Google Sheets as a back end
#10This seems like 5 years down the road this is going to turn into a horror story on HN, about "I went to this customer, and they had been running their entire company database on a single Google Sheet, and now are panicking because the secretary accidentally just deleted everyone from pay roll."
I'm not sure if I'm saying this seriously or not, but:
no worries! In addition to its granular permissions systems which will now let you revoke the secretary's access, Sheets also has a robust backup and restore story built-in! Just click File -> Version history and rollback the offending change. (You can do a live preview of what the effect will be, to confirm you're rolling back the right change.)
The problem Sheets has is that they built a tool that is too good :)