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PlanetScale is now generally available

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Re: PlanetScale is now generally available

#21

Post by 256DEV »

herodotus wrote: post #7

I am having trouble understanding what a "Serveless Database" is. When I do a search of the term, I get hype, not a definition. For example: "What is Serverless Database? Serverless Database is a prerequisite for Serverless Computing. These are specially designed for the workloads which are unpredictable and can change rapidly. What’s more? This allows you to pay only for the database resources you use, on a second-b…

Basically I understand the idea of serverless in this context as abstracting away everything related to managing & maintaining the database - i.e. anything like VMs, containers, OS, DB processes etc.

So you can set up a PlanetScale MySQL DB and use it just like a normal instance of MySQL, but also keep adding data from one small set of records all the way up until you have gigantic petabyte volumes of data without having to do anything beyond sending the data through your MySQL connector.

In theory it should just keep working in a performant way from 100 user records for your new startup to the scale of running parts of Slack. No choosing bigger and bigger AWS RDS instances as you scale, no need for autoscale strategies in case of traffic surges or worrying about replicas for perf etc. etc.

As someone who is honestly quite resistant to parts of the serverless paradigm this offering actually appeals to me. I prefer running my own fleet of VMs and traditional PHP/Nginx type stack but have already moved to AWS RDS to abstract away some of the replication complexity required to achieve high availability DB with minimum hassle. This seems like the logical next step and despite being allergic to kind of hype you mention finding this is something I'd definitely try out before moving other parts of my infrastructure onto anything like Lambda.

Re: PlanetScale is now generally available

#22

Post by Xorlev »

"built on top of the only open source database proven at hyper scale, Vitess."

Vitess is a sharding layer. Furthermore, I'm sure Cassandra (for all it's flaws) would beg to differ, Netflix had a huge C* deployment.

Is hyperscale larger than webscale? Hmm...

Re: PlanetScale is now generally available

#23

Post by zild3d »

herodotus wrote: post #7

I am having trouble understanding what a "Serveless Database" is. When I do a search of the term, I get hype, not a definition. For example: "What is Serverless Database? Serverless Database is a prerequisite for Serverless Computing. These are specially designed for the workloads which are unpredictable and can change rapidly. What’s more? This allows you to pay only for the database resources you use, on a second-b…

With a dedicated Mongo DB cluster (server-full), you are paying for a certain cluster size, per hour. It doesn't matter if you read or write any data to it. You're paying for a machine with a specific amount of storage capacity and cpu. Use it or lose it.

DynamoDB (considered serverless), you're charged based on the read and write throughput, and how much you have stored (GB-month). If you don't store any data, you're not being charged for unused storage capacity, like a dedicated cluster. You don't think about the instance size, amount of memory, etc.

- https://www.mongodb.com/pricing

- https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/pricing/on-demand/

Re: PlanetScale is now generally available

#24

Post by boiler_up800 »

gh123man wrote: post #14

This seems cool. I am currently shopping around for a cheap managed database for an app I am launching soon (and bootstrapping - so cost is a concern right now). We are starting small but want room to grow. The free tier looks really promising! Especially compared to some of the entry level plans on other cloud providers. Can anyone who has tried Planetscale and compared it to other managed database solutions tell me…

I've tried Aurora and Firebase. I think PlanetScale wins on 2 areas at 2 different scales: branching when you're small, and connections when you're large.

With branching it's a feature where every dev can run a command and get their own database version to mess with. They can submit a pull request and as the tech lead I can check it and publish it to prod. Or integrate it with our CI.

On connections, it is interesting how serverless architectures totally flip the model. My node servers used to make a few connections to Postgres while serving thousands of users. Now, each NextJS instance makes its own connection and I might have thousands of database connections for thousands of users. PlanetScale is the only one I know of with effectively no limit on the number of connections. I think Aurora tops out at 16,000.

Re: PlanetScale is now generally available

#25

Post by ComputerGuru »

samhw wrote: post #13
ComputerGuru wrote: post #6

So does this share MySQL’s weaknesses? As someone that used MySQL for over a decade before seeing the light and switching to Postgres, I’d be more reassured if this wasn’t compatible with any existing RDBMS than with it being MySQL compatible.

Vitess is basically a sharding layer on top of MySQL nodes, so yes, it will almost certainly retain whatever MySQL warts you dislike. It's clustered MySQL - not simply a different database speaking the same dialect, like CockroachDB is to Postgres.

Thanks for the explanation! The link for this submission is useless and I’m on mobile. I was indeed thinking of Cockroach.

Re: PlanetScale is now generally available

#26

Post by zild3d »

moralestapia wrote: post #18
herodotus wrote: post #7

I am having trouble understanding what a "Serveless Database" is. When I do a search of the term, I get hype, not a definition. For example: "What is Serverless Database? Serverless Database is a prerequisite for Serverless Computing. These are specially designed for the workloads which are unpredictable and can change rapidly. What’s more? This allows you to pay only for the database resources you use, on a second-b…

You don't provision and manage the infrastructure associated with your DB. Someone else does it for you and you just focus on querying/storing the data and whatever else your business requires you to do.

Not provisioning & managing is part of it, but the pricing model is important too. e.g. RDS and Mongo Atlas are managed database services so you're not provisioning and managing the infra, but you are paying for dedicated machines and their sizes, etc.

Re: PlanetScale is now generally available

#27

Post by romero-jk »

herodotus wrote: post #7

I am having trouble understanding what a "Serveless Database" is. When I do a search of the term, I get hype, not a definition. For example: "What is Serverless Database? Serverless Database is a prerequisite for Serverless Computing. These are specially designed for the workloads which are unpredictable and can change rapidly. What’s more? This allows you to pay only for the database resources you use, on a second-b…

DyanmoDB is truly serverless, they give you a http endpoint and that's it, you don't have to deal with database connections.

Re: PlanetScale is now generally available

#28

Post by herodotus »

soamv wrote: post #19
herodotus wrote: post #7

I am having trouble understanding what a "Serveless Database" is. When I do a search of the term, I get hype, not a definition. For example: "What is Serverless Database? Serverless Database is a prerequisite for Serverless Computing. These are specially designed for the workloads which are unpredictable and can change rapidly. What’s more? This allows you to pay only for the database resources you use, on a second-b…

There is no clear definition with universal agreement. It's a hype-y term applied with... varying levels of rigor. However, roughly speaking, "serverless" rolls together 3 features: 1. Fine grained pay-per-use (e.g. pay for a query by the number of rows scanned) 2. The pricing dial goes down to zero when usage is small enough. 3. You generally don't control VM/instance-level scaling but something closer to the abstra…

Thanks

Re: PlanetScale is now generally available

#29

Post by jeffbee »

mooreds wrote: post #20
epberry wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The referential integrity piece (otherwise known as Foreign Keys) will not be addressed and is a limitation - some might say feature - of Vitess. They wrote a pretty good piece about it here, https://docs.planetscale.com/tutorials/operating-without-for...

Thanks, that looks pretty useful. To me, this means that planetscale (and vitess) immediately become less useful for a large class of applications: existing apps that use an RDBMS that you want to scale. Because most existing apps will expect FKs. I haven't tested my employer's application (which has FKs) to see what will happen, but I doubt it will be smooth sailing. But there's probably plenty of greenfield develop…

There is not and will never be a solution to the problem of horizontally scaling an application and database designed jointly for a single-box ACID RDBMS. You have to compromise something to get the scaling.

Re: PlanetScale is now generally available

#30

Post by nojito »

>What’s more? This allows you to pay only for the database resources you use, on a second-by-second basis. ..."

This is the biggest sham in technology offerings today. The idea that you only pay what you use is a misnomer.

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