A hypothetical search engine on S3 with Tantivy and warm cache on NVMe

I’ve been curious about how far you can push object storage as a foundation for database-like systems. In previous posts, I explored moving JSON data from PostgreSQL to Parquet on S3 and building MVCC-style tables with constant-time deletes using S3’s conditional writes. These experiments showed that decoupling storage from compute unlocks interesting trade-offs while lowering costs and simpler operations in exchange for higher cold query latency.
Search engines traditionally don’t fit this model.