$50 PlanetScale Metal Is GA for Postgres • Hacker News Board

Re: $50 PlanetScale Metal Is GA for Postgres

#31

Post by JoshGlazebrook » Mon, Dec 15, 2025, 5:22 PM UTC

orliesaurus wrote: post #5

I'm stoked about this release too... From what I can tell, the 'Metal' offering runs on nodes with directly attached NVMe rather than network-attached storage. That means there isn't a per-customer IOPS cap – they actually market it as 'unlimited I/O' because you hit CPU before saturating the disk. The new $50 M-class clusters are essentially smaller versions of those nodes with adjustable CPU and RAM in AWS and GCP…

> 'unlimited I/O' because you hit CPU before saturating the disk.

So in the M-10 case, wouldn't this actually be somewhat misleading as I imagine hitting "1/8 vCPU" wouldn't be difficult at all?

Re: $50 PlanetScale Metal Is GA for Postgres

#32

Post by samlambert » Mon, Dec 15, 2025, 5:24 PM UTC

taw1285 wrote: post #29

For the less experienced devs, how should I be thinking about choosing between this vs Amazon Aurora?

It will be faster and a lot easier to use than Aurora.

Re: $50 PlanetScale Metal Is GA for Postgres

#33

Post by ShakataGaNai » Mon, Dec 15, 2025, 5:26 PM UTC

rcrowley wrote: post #16

anoojb wrote: post #11

Perhaps a naive question — but why would someone use a dedicated database provider and connect from another cloud provider's application service? ...as opposed to using the same provider's db + app service offering? Wouldn't this introduce additional latency among other issues?

PlanetScale operates databases in AWS and GCP. There's no network latency penalty for choosing PlanetScale if you're hosting your app in one of those cloud providers (and in one of the many regions we operate in).

More importantly, no bandwidth charge penalty. As leaving AWS isn't inexpensive.

Re: $50 PlanetScale Metal Is GA for Postgres

#34

Post by everfrustrated » Mon, Dec 15, 2025, 5:28 PM UTC

Doesnt "Metal" infer you get the whole box to yourself? Curious if my definitions are different to others here because I don't get what's "Metal" about sharing an instance with others.

You're still sharing nvme IO, cpu, memory bandwidth, etc. Not having a VM isn't really the point. (EDIT: and could have been done with non-metal aws instances with direct-attached nvme anyway)

Re: $50 PlanetScale Metal Is GA for Postgres

#35

Post by bigTMZfan » Mon, Dec 15, 2025, 5:29 PM UTC

Will these smaller instances be offered for Vitess / MySQL compatible users?

Re: $50 PlanetScale Metal Is GA for Postgres

#36

Post by Onavo » Mon, Dec 15, 2025, 5:32 PM UTC

So what happens if you get a nvme failure? Is there automatic failover and restore?

How does cross data center nodes work?

Re: $50 PlanetScale Metal Is GA for Postgres

#37

Post by rcrowley » Mon, Dec 15, 2025, 5:33 PM UTC

Onavo wrote: post #36

So what happens if you get a nvme failure? Is there automatic failover and restore? How does cross data center nodes work?

These are all three-node clusters with PlanetScale's management handling backup, restore, failover, and replication.

Re: $50 PlanetScale Metal Is GA for Postgres

#38

Post by rcrowley » Mon, Dec 15, 2025, 5:34 PM UTC

bigTMZfan wrote: post #35

Will these smaller instances be offered for Vitess / MySQL compatible users?

Soon!

Re: $50 PlanetScale Metal Is GA for Postgres

#39

Post by mikkelam » Mon, Dec 15, 2025, 5:35 PM UTC

taw1285 wrote: post #29

For the less experienced devs, how should I be thinking about choosing between this vs Amazon Aurora?

They have a very nice comparison in terms of performance and price https://planetscale.com/benchmarks/aurora

Re: $50 PlanetScale Metal Is GA for Postgres

#40

Post by rcrowley » Mon, Dec 15, 2025, 5:35 PM UTC

everfrustrated wrote: post #34

Doesnt "Metal" infer you get the whole box to yourself? Curious if my definitions are different to others here because I don't get what's "Metal" about sharing an instance with others. You're still sharing nvme IO, cpu, memory bandwidth, etc. Not having a VM isn't really the point. (EDIT: and could have been done with non-metal aws instances with direct-attached nvme anyway)

Within PlanetScale's product lineup, Metal refers to the use of local NVMe drives. Nothing more. These extremely affordable sizes are indeed slices of larger boxen, though no resources are overcommitted.