What I learned building a vector database on object storage

When I came across Turbopuffer , a vector database built entirely on object storage, I got curious. Really curious. The architecture seemed almost too simple. Write-ahead logs on S3? Centroid-based indexes ? Stateless query nodes ? It felt like someone had taken all the "rules" of database design and just... ignored them. I wanted to understand the tradeoffs myself. Not by reading more blog posts,…