> It was strange to me that there was no log-as-service with the qualities that make it suitable for building higher-level systems like durable execution
Indeed. We are trying to democratize that secret sauce. Since it is backed by object storage, the latencies are not what AWS enjoys with its internal Journal service, but we intend to get there with a NVMe-based tier later. In the meantime there is an existing large market for event streaming where a "truly serverless" (https://erikbern.com/2021/04/19/software-infrastructure-2.0-...) API has been missing.
There are several services like that, but they are mostly kept behind the scene as a competitive advantage when building distributed systems. AWS uses it behind the scene for many services, as mentioned here by Marc Brooker https://brooker.co.za/blog/2024/04/25/memorydb.html. Facebook has similar systems like LogDevice https://logdevice.io/, and recently Delos https://research.facebook.com/publications/log-structured-pr...