:mnesia.start()

I’m not saying you are wrong that mnesia could be used in that capacity.

I was casting a much wider net to speculate where this could be going (considering another recent trend)?

Whether in the long run this is pushing towards an architectural style that allows an ephemeral deploy of a stateful application or application shard to an edge compute node to serve 1 to n users primarily from a local cache - something that is neither “serverless” or “serverful” because most of the processing doesn’t happen on the client or near persistent storage.

I never believed in Redis or Memcached even in my Rails days – to me they were a bandaid. I always thought, even as far back as when I coded C, C++ and Java, that every runtime needs its own builtin caching system, or, at least, a system allowing you to put stuff in in-memory database and use it almost transparently.

That’s one of my reasons for sticking with Elixir – it has that and more. OTP itself, plus ETS, persistent_term, atomics / counters, and a few more, gives you an experience that Redis and Memcached can only dream of (sans some querying though).

I don’t think Amazon, Google and Microsoft (and any cloud compute/storage provider) would risk their business like that. But even in my small country some internet business prefer to co-locate their own servers with their corporate ISP of choice.