PlanetScale has announced the general availability of its managed sharded Postgres service, built for performance and reliability on AWS or Google Cloud. The launch extends PlanetScale’s offerings to PostgreSQL users, adding to the company’s existing popular MySQL-based platform built on top of Vitess.
PlanetScale Metal is built on local NVMe drives and provides “Unlimited I/O,” with customers typically running out of CPU resources before utilizing all available I/O bandwidth. PlanetScale claims that its solution reduces latency and improves consistency, offering a reportedly more cost-effective alternative to equivalent setups on Amazon Aurora, Google Cloud SQL, or Supabase.
The new Postgres offering reflects the growing industry shift toward PostgreSQL as the preferred open-source database standard. In announcing the general availability, Sam Lambert, co-founder and CEO of PlanetScale, highlights their next goal, horizontal scaling with Neki:
Neki is our Postgres sharding solution. Built by the team behind Vitess combining 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.
Vitess is a clustering system developed at YouTube to scale MySQL horizontally from one to thousands of servers, each with its own local storage. While Vitess started as an open source project in 2010, the database infrastructure company has chosen a different path for Neki, and the source code is currently not available. Lambert explains:
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 the only project trying to provide a clustering solution for Postgres similar to Vitess. Sugu Sougoumarane, formerly the CTO and co-founder at PlanetScale, is working on the open source Multigres. Defined as “Vitess for Postgres,” Multigres is a horizontally scalable Postgres architecture that supports multi-tenant, highly available, and globally distributed deployments.
On a popular thread on Hacker News, many users discuss the benefits of a Postgres-based solution, highlighting how most modern distributed database offerings prioritize Postgres compatibility over MySQL. Anirudh Coontoor shares their early experience with the product:
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.
PlanetScale recently 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, quips:
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 controversial decision to retire their Hobby plan in 2024, PlanetScale no longer offers free plans, and the managed plans currently start at 39 USD per month. Max Englander, software engineer at PlanetScale, shares the company’s vision and comments on Hacker News:
If a business can’t afford to spend $39/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.
During the recent Cloudflare Birthday Week, PlanetScale and Cloudflare announced a partnership to deploy PlanetScale databases directly from Workers, supporting full-stack applications backed by Postgres or MySQL on the serverless computing platform.
