On the Performance of Cloud-based Spreadsheets as a Backend for View-only Web Applications

The wide offering of cloud-based services brings alternatives to traditional approaches for developing modern information systems. In this work, we examine cloud spreadsheet services as an alternative for data backend in small scale, view-only web applications. We review 6 cloud-based spreadsheets offering data access APIs to third-party applications, then we present a set of performance tests over spreadsheets hosted on Google Sheets. Preliminary findings show a performance penalty for transferring JSON-formatted data and an expressive failed request rate for many simultaneous accesses.