[ProofHouse]

Not a single explanation of what ‘PlanetScale’ is, does (or how) on that landing page. A product, a service, a new offering or scaling paradigm, a cloud? Etc

Sure you can click around to determine but this always annoys me. Like everyone should know what your product is and does and all you service names. Put it front and center at the top!

[richieartoul]

It's not a landing page, it's a blog, and if you read the first few sentences of the post it becomes immediately clear what service PlanetScale provides.

[DarkNova6]

The first few sentences mean absolutely squat.

> Our mission is simple: bring you the fastest and most reliable databases with the best developer experience. We have done this for 5 years now with our managed Vitess product, allowing companies like Cursor, Intercom, and Block to scale beyond previous limits.

> We are so excited to bring this to Postgres. Our proprietary operator allows us to bring the maturity of PlanetScale and the performance of Metal to an even wider audience. We bring you the best of Postgres and the best of PlanetScale in one product.

Seriously??

[therein]

Sounds like it is yet another Postgres cloud offering. It is a little cringe for them to self-congratulate and say "allowing companies like Cursor, Intercom, and Block to scale beyond previous limits".

Did any of these companies reach out to them and say "you know, we wouldn't have been able to scale beyond our previous limits without you, thank you so much guys you saved us". If not, this is so insincere that it is cringe.

Are they implying these other companies lacked knowledge and expertise to put their databases on machines with NVMe storage? Or is it that they chose to use their product? If it is the latter, they should just say these companies chose us, instead of emphasizing how they just couldn't scale past their previous limits without PlanetScale's help.

[samlambert]

happy to answer this with direct customer quotes from the companies you mentioned. all of these quotes are public:

"We chose PlanetScale to host our most demanding Vitess and Postgres workloads, doing millions of queries per second on hundreds of terabytes of data." – Sualeh Asif - Chief Product Officer @Anysphere (Cursor)

"Moving to PlanetScale added a 9 to our uptime." - Brian Scanlan @Intercom https://x.com/brian_scanlan/status/1963552743294967877

"In the past we've had issues when something unusual happens on a specific shard, resulting in spiked CPU and poor performance, and since migrating we haven't really seen instances of this, speaking to PlanetScale choosing the correct hardware for our existing load at the outset." - Aaron Young, Engineering Manager @block

It seems like you are reaching pretty hard to find an issue with this statement. Your comment seems to come from a lack of experience scaling databases and not understanding how difficult it is to do what we've done in partnership with our customers. Either that or deep or a high level of insincerity.

[therein]

> It seems like you are reaching pretty hard to find an issue with this statement. Your comment seems to come from a lack of experience scaling databases and not understanding how difficult it is to do what we've done in partnership with our customers. Either that or deep or a high level of insincerity.

Up until this, I was gonna say, fair enough, I appreciate the direct replies from the staff.

But this paragraph settles it for me: PlanetScale as a company has a narcissistic personality which is fine for some I guess. Hopefully one day you will have a product that justifies that huge ego.

[samlambert]

you made a dumb comment and got heat for it. i don't think that represents a narcissistic personality. regardless of what you think of us i wish you all the best.

[ksec]

>But this paragraph settles it for me: PlanetScale as a company has a narcissistic personality which is fine for some I guess. Hopefully one day you will have a product that justifies that huge ego.

What you wrote earlier.

>Did any of these companies reach out to them and say "you know, we wouldn't have been able to scale beyond our previous limits without you, thank you so much guys you saved us". If not, this is so insincere that it is cringe.

I guess I will let the rest of HN be the judge.

[maxenglander]

> instead of emphasizing how they just couldn't scale past their previous limits.

We are not saying that our customers don't have the knowledge or expertise to do what we do. Many of our customers, including the ones mentioned above, have exceptionally high levels of expertise and talent.

Even so, it is not a contradiction to say that we allowed them to scale beyond their previous limits. In some cases those limits were that their previous DBaaS providers simply lacked the ability to scale horizontally or provide blazing fast reads and writes the way we do out of the box. In other cases, we offer a degree of reliability and uptime that exceeded what customers' previous DBaaS could provide. Just two name a couple of limits customers have run into before choosing PlanetScale.

Expertise and know-how, and actually doing the thing, are different. Many of our customers who are technically capable of doing what we do would simply prefer to focus their knowledge and expertise building their core product, and let the database experts (that's us) do the databasing.

[sgarland]

> Are they implying these other companies lacked knowledge and expertise to put their databases on machines with NVMe storage?

Have you worked at any web dev companies? Of the ones I’ve been at, precisely one had any desire to run their own DBs, and deaf was more out of necessity due to poor schema design needing local NVMe just to stay afloat.

Yes, most web companies lack the experience to touch a server, because their staff are all cloud-native, and their CTOs have drank the Kool-Aid and are convinced that it’s dangerous and risky to manage a server.

[pier25]

If would have taken you less time to google "planetscale" than to write this comment.

[ProofHouse]

I mean add a 1-2 sentence description of the HOW to this paragraph. Cause like great, but how. This is just marketing fluff and a user has to navigate the site to then understand what PlanetScale itself does (and how), if not familiar;

What is PlanetScale for Postgres?

Our mission is simple: bring you the fastest and most reliable databases with the best developer experience. We have done this for 5 years now with our managed Vitess product, allowing companies like Cursor, Intercom, and Block to scale beyond previous limits.

[brettgriffin]

Literally the first line of every line on the site:

> PlanetScale is the world’s fastest relational database platform. We offer PostgreSQL and Vitess databases that run on NVMe-backed nodes to bring you scale, performance, reliability, and cost-efficiencies — without sacrificing developer experience.

> PlanetScale is a relational database platform that brings you scale, performance, and reliability — without sacrificing developer experience.

> We offer both Vitess and PostgreSQL clusters, powered by locally-attached NVMe drives that deliver unlimited IOPS and ultra-low latency.

> PlanetScale Metal is the fastest way to run databases in AWS or GCP. With blazing fast NVMe drives, you can unlock unlimited IOPS, ultra-low latencies, and the highest throughput for your workloads.

> The world’s fastest and most scalable cloud databases PlanetScale brings you the fastest databases available in the cloud. Both our Postgres and Vitess databases deliver exceptional speed and reliability, with Vitess adding ultra scalability through horizontal sharding.

> Our blazing fast NVMe drives unlock unlimited IOPS, bringing data center performance to the cloud. We offer a range of deployment options to cover all of your security and compliance requirements — including bring your own cloud with PlanetScale Managed.

Ironically, the _how_ is a major topic of the very page you started on (the blog).

Have some agency.

[cyberpunk]

This isn’t any kind of answer it’s a bunch of non-statements..

How is this any different that rds on nvme disks?

With a name like planet scale i assumed it would be some multi-master setup?

[benjiro]

Planetscale used to run postgres on AWS with network attached storage. So every time the DB hits the disks > it goes over the network. Need to read 4kb > network, another 4kb > network. So your latency is instead of microsecond on local storage, its miliseconds. Where a local NVME can do ... 100k 4k reads, over the network storage it does maybe 1k (just a example).

The problem is, there are not a lot of solutions to scale postgres beyond a single server. So if your DB grows to 100TB ... you have a issue as AWS does not provide a 100TB local NVME solution, only network storage.

Here comes Niki or whatever they named it. Their own alternative to Vitess (see Mysql), what is a solution that allows Mysql to scale horizontally from 1 to 1000's of servers, each with their own local storage.

So Planetscale made their own solution, so they can horizontal scale dozens, hundreds of AWS VPS with their own local storage, to give you those 100, 200, 500TB of storage space, without the need for network based storage.

There are other solutions like CockroachDB, YukubyteDB, TiDB that also allow for horizontal scaling but non are 100% postgres (and especially extensions) compatible.

Side node: The guy that wrote Vitess for Mysql, is also working on multigress (https://multigres.com/), a solution that does the same. Aka Vitess for postgres.

So yea, hope this helps a bit to explain it. If your not into dealing with DB scaling, the way they wrote it is really not helpful.

[parthdesai]

> Side node: The guy that wrote Vitess for Mysql, is also working on multigress (https://multigres.com/), a solution that does the same. Aka Vitess for postgres.

And also was the founder of planetscale

[whizzter]

sharded setup with a bit fast and loose foreign key management, so very good for performance but not a drop-in replacement if you rely on your foreign keys to be constrained/checked by the database.

[sgarland]

So perfect for most web dev companies, then.

“We handle FKs in the app for flexibility.”

“And how many orphaned rows do you have?”

“…”

[rcrowley]

The question isn't how many orphaned rows do you have, it's whether it matters. Databases are wonderful but they cannot maintain every invariant and they cannot express a whole application. They're one tool in the belt.

[rcrowley]

The short answer is that RDS doesn't run on local NVMe disks, it runs on EBS.

[dkhenry]

I would just point out that its Hosted Postgres. If your looking for a how I think you have the wrong mental model. Its hosted Postgres, there are some nuance there as to why it would perform differently from RDS on Amazon, or CloudSQL on GCP, but its not some novel new technology that needs a long description.

If you are interested in their new technology that extends on hosted postgres check out Neki https://www.neki.dev/

[tjoekbezoer]

Well, above the fold in the chapter 'What is PlanetScale for Postgres?' the second paragraph mentions custom operator. That makes me assume it is kubernetes.

[samlambert]

it is kubernetes