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Ask HN: Is there a free/fremium hash table in the cloud with simple HTTP access?

8 points by THRWAWA20160222 ↗ HN
I'm looking for a hash table in the cloud.

It should just have basic operations: get, set, and delete.

It should support basic auth over http. If it has a "freemium" model that is okay too.

Does this exist? If not, would you be interested in it?

9 comments

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mike255x
You can use any REDIS service on the cloud. An example: https://redislabs.com/. If you are on Heroku there are multiple REDIS plugins.
maerF0x0
REDIS doesnt use http protocol by default, but looks like maybe this could work. http://webd.is/
THRWAWA20160222
Thanks. What if you don't want to manage anything. Is there an interest or a market for "Hashtable as a service" ?
bifrost
I have seen a couple variants, but none of them have stuck around for long since they ended up being CnC for botnets/malware/etc.

I think it would be safe to assume there are also collision problems in unauthenticated ones as well...

xyzzy123
I'm not aware of any services with the simple API you're looking for (neat idea), but there are a lot of more complicated solutions.

What are the key/value durability requirements? (OK to drop values now and then, or does it need to keep them until the end of time?). Need backups? Do values expire, or do you have to expire them manually? Since you can't enumerate or search, how do you delete things? Allowed sizes of keys and values, between bytes and terabytes? How far should it scale? Shared namespace, or namespace per user? Do you need a latency guarantee? How low? Are you gonna use it for something important and need an SLA on the availability of the service as a whole?

A couple of "nearby" points in the solution space:

Amazon S3 is a KV store where the keys look like filenames and the values look like files. High durability, good scaling, pretty high latency. You could also obviously paper a KV store on top of ElastiCache or DynamoDB, which are going to have different properties.

Going low-level and implementing your own in say, golang would probably be the most fun though :p

Hard to say if we could use a SAAS KV store at work without a lot more technical detail on the solution. I'm having a hard time thinking of an app where you'd want a KV store, but not need a database or NoSQL store which you could use instead.

THRWAWA20160222
One area where the hashtable as a service would be for integrating different devices that are behind firewalls. They can reach out to the Internet. There are some use cases where being able to exchange information, even a small amount at a time, is very useful.
namtao
It does! I wanted exactly the same and couldn't find something simple enough, so I made it (last month):

Stord.io is a key/value store. This is often modelled as a hashmap or a dictionary in programming languages.

Under the hood, stord.io is powered by Redis, with a thin python application wrapper, based on Flask. Stord.io doesn’t assume anything about your data, make whatever nested schema you want!

http://stord.io

Full disclosure: if this wasn't already clear, it's my project. I would LOVE feedback/feature suggestions.