Most apps can use a single-instance relational database or document store. Fast enough with plenty of features. When requirements increase, there are many distr

Most apps can use a single-instance relational database or document store. Fast enough with plenty of features. When requirements increase, there are many distributed relational and document stores that provide more scalability and performance. Key/value stores offer a low-level API to handle extreme requirements when nothing else works. An example is adtech platforms where user profiles and contextual data need to be accessed in a fraction of a second to respond to an ad request, often hitting queries-per-second in the 6/7 figure range. Another example is CDNs that need to lookup a specific piece of data across a large dataset very quickly. As of 2022, there are plenty of key/value stores like Redis, HBase/Bigtable, Aerospike, ScyllaDB that have various trade-offs in speed, scale and flexibility. What sets FDB apart is strong consistency (supporting transactions across multiple keys) and extreme reliability which makes it a good choice as a core metadata and coordination service that other complex apps and distributed systems can rely on. For example, Apple uses it as a backend for CloudKit, and Snowflake uses it to store the metadata and operations of its cloud data warehouse. Here's a video playlist from several other companies talking about it at FoundationDB Summit: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbzoR-pLrL6oWYrC950yAhbLk8FRRB_Bt https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbzoR-pLrL6oWYrC950yA...