PlanetScale has officially launched its managed sharded Postgres service, marking a significant expansion of its offerings tailored for PostgreSQL users. This new service is designed to deliver enhanced performance and reliability, operating seamlessly on either AWS or Google Cloud. It complements the company’s existing MySQL-based platform, which is built on the robust Vitess framework.
Performance and Cost-Effectiveness
At the core of PlanetScale Metal is its utilization of local NVMe drives, which enables what the company describes as “Unlimited I/O.” Users often find themselves constrained by CPU resources long before they reach the limits of available I/O bandwidth. This innovative architecture aims to minimize latency and enhance consistency, presenting a compelling and cost-effective alternative to comparable solutions like Amazon Aurora, Google Cloud SQL, or Supabase.
The introduction of this Postgres service aligns with the industry’s increasing preference for PostgreSQL as the go-to open-source database standard. In a recent announcement, Sam Lambert, co-founder and CEO of PlanetScale, shared insights into the company’s future aspirations, particularly regarding horizontal scaling through their upcoming solution, Neki:
Neki is our Postgres sharding solution. Built by the team behind Vitess, it combines the best of Vitess and Postgres. Neki is not a fork of Vitess. Vitess’ achievements are enabled by leveraging MySQL’s strengths and engineering around its weaknesses.
Architectural Innovations
Vitess, originally developed at YouTube, serves as a clustering system that allows MySQL to scale horizontally from a single server to thousands, each equipped with its own local storage. While Vitess began as an open-source project in 2010, PlanetScale has opted for a different trajectory with Neki, currently withholding its source code. Lambert elaborates on this strategic choice:
To achieve Vitess’ power for Postgres, we are architecting from first principles and building alongside design partners at scale. When we are ready, we will release Neki as an open-source project suitable for running the most demanding Postgres workloads.
PlanetScale is not alone in its quest for a clustering solution for Postgres akin to Vitess. Sugu Sougoumarane, a former CTO and co-founder at PlanetScale, is developing Multigres, described as “Vitess for Postgres.” This architecture aims to support multi-tenant, highly available, and globally distributed deployments.
User Experiences and Market Trends
A lively discussion on Hacker News has emerged, where users are sharing their experiences with Postgres-based solutions, noting a trend where modern distributed database offerings increasingly prioritize Postgres compatibility over MySQL. Anirudh Coontoor recently shared their positive experience:
We just migrated to PlanetScale Postgres Metal over the weekend. We are already seeing major query improvements. The migration was pretty smooth. (…) The Insights tab also surfaced missing indexes we added, which sped things up further. Early days, but so far so good.
In conjunction with this launch, PlanetScale has released benchmarks comparing the performance of Postgres on PlanetScale and Supabase, as well as other services supporting Postgres. Jeremy Daly, director of research at CloudZero, humorously remarked:
PlanetScale for Postgres is now GA, proving that MySQL continues to lose favor with devs. But I’m sure it has nothing to do with Oracle.
Following the decision to retire their Hobby plan in 2024, PlanetScale has transitioned away from offering free plans, with managed plans now starting at per month. Max Englander, a software engineer at PlanetScale, articulated the company’s perspective on this change:
If a business can’t afford to spend /mo to try PlanetScale, they may be happier operating elsewhere until their business grows to a point where they are running into scaling and performance limits and can afford (or badly need, depending on the severity of those limits) to try us out.
In a recent collaboration, PlanetScale and Cloudflare announced a partnership that allows for the deployment of PlanetScale databases directly from Workers, facilitating full-stack applications powered by either Postgres or MySQL on the serverless computing platform.
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Renato Losio
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