The earliest and most popular thing that was called a 🤷‍♂️serverless🤷‍♂️ database, was probably AWS’s DynamoDB, and as Forrest Brazeal correctly pointed out, in Nov 2017: DynamoDB isn’t for everyone.

It changed/introduced new features since then, so here is the checklist filled out for DynamoDB:

Supports true pay per use?

Since on-demand pricing was introduced: yes.

2. Provisioning, scaling, backups, and other maintenance fully automated?

Yes!

3. Offers global locality on-demand?

Say “Hi!” to Global Tables: Yes.

4. Networking is not an issue over multiple data centers / regions?

More or less yes, especially when you vendor lock. The Serverless Framework even lets you setup DynamoDB tables in your servelress.yml and running with AWS Lambda never caused issues for me. Running on other Serverless Platforms: 🤷‍♂️.

5. Provides an analytics and/or monitoring interface to study your current load? (e.g. query execution times)

Not really. DynamoDB is not providing much monitoring insight. There are some interesting CloudWatch metrics, but still a long way to the level of monitoring we are looking for. But based on this Blog Post by Segment, AWS can provide you deeper insights on request. 🙆‍♂️ That’s something.

6. A database model that fits your domain problem? (ACID Transactions, Schema(less), Relations, …)

There are a few uses cases where it may fit. Up to you.