So the Tailscale team were using a single text file as a database (as you do) and it worked great… until it didn’t.

Even with fast NVMe drives and splitting the database into two halves (important data vs. ephemeral data that we could lose on a tmpfs), things got slower and slower. We knew the day would come. The file reached a peak size of 150MB and we were writing it as quickly as the disk I/O would let us. Ain’t that just peachy?

So, migrate to MySQL or PostgreSQL, right? Maybe SQLite?

Nope, Crawshaw had other ideas.

I won’t ruin the surprise and tell you what they went with, but I will say it’s a widely deployed system amongst cloud natives…