Google Cloud Datastore was initially released in 2008 as the de facto data persistence solution for App Engine applications. App Engine was designed to provide developers with a highly managed application platform that greatly simplified hard problems such as scalability and reliability. This meant that any companion data persistence solution would need to provide similar qualities.
One of the driving philosophies of App Engine is that developers can build simple applications that work well at any scale. This makes it possible to build and run very small-scale services in an easy and cost-effective way. Those services can then scale to handle extremely heavy loads, without having to rearchitect solutions or migrate to other platforms.
Likewise, Datastore is as equally effective at a very small scale as it is in web-scale solutions. The data platform scales...