I think that the most common way to use loopback is in your own server. I'm currently working in a project with Loopback and we host it in AWS. The SAAS option it's just an option, using loopback self-hosted it's perfectly fine. Answering @sosana, Loopback is an API framework based on Express, using Express instead of Loopback means losing a lot of great features like the Swagger compliant model generator and the AngularJs SDK.

Index event_id. If the performance of this read operation its far way important than the write of event_ranks, you can index all the fields in the select of the query (all in this case) making a covering index (an index that covers all the fields in the query). This is would do the trick. When indexing multiple fields in one index, put the one in the where first and the ones in the select later.

Maybe you can take a look at LoopBack , it is currently backed by IBM. We've built nice APIs with it.