Hi Joe, since this AWS announcement in June https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/using-amazon-efs-for-aws-lambda-in-your-serverless-applications/ it has been possible that RocksDB-on-EFS could be used with Crux nodes running on Lambda, but we've not tried to prove the concept yet. If that approach actually works well it probably would feel quite similar to Ions and benefit from many of the same qualities. The query performance would not be as good as if RocksDB were running on a local SSD but it might be a reasonable tradeoff for many use-cases. Right now the proven path is to have big nodes running on big machines. It's possible that you could craft something similar to Ions to run on top of these big machines, as a layer above Crux. It's also worth mentioning that making Crux work in a more Cloud-native style (where storage and compute are separated) is definitely on our roadmap 🙂

thanks for your answer refset!

You might get away with some small footprint EC2 hosts. A t4g.small clocks in at 3-12 USD/month depending on the upfornt payment. 🤷