Serverless Battleground - DynamoDB vs Firestore vs MongoDB vs Cassandra vs Redis vs FaunaDB
Blog post from Upstash
A sample application was created to compare the performance of leading serverless databases—DynamoDB, MongoDB (Atlas), Firestore, Cassandra (Datastax Astra), FaunaDB, and Redis (Upstash)—by measuring the latency of fetching the top 10 news articles in a common web use case using serverless functions. The data consists of 7,001 real news articles from the New York Times API, and latency was measured by executing a specific query while excluding database connection and network latency. Each database had custom configurations, such as indexing and regional deployment, to optimize performance measurements. The study found varying performances, with special notes on consistency and replication for FaunaDB, and performance nuances like cold connection overhead for Firestore and non-updatable primary keys for Cassandra. The project is ongoing, with plans for code refactoring and further improvements, and encourages community feedback via social media platforms.