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Let's Build PlanetScale from Scratch: Infrastructure

onatm.dev

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Re: Let's Build PlanetScale from Scratch: Infrastructure

#7

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

I think this is confusing Planetscale's primary objective: to make it incredibly easy and efficient to scale a database up and out.

There's no mention of sharding whatsoever. Without that this has very little to do with Planetscale and is much closer to your average managed DB (RDS etc.). There's also no mention of a bouncer/gateway/reverse proxy, which is necessary for zero downtime.

I get that Planetscale hosts "vanilla" Postgres instances but naturally those are limited by single instance size limits. I imagine this is predominantly a marketing strategy for them, acting as a funnel for their sharding products.

But perhaps that's the goal with this project, to not be Planetscale at all, and to focus on the single node. If that's the case, then great, best of luck, but the roadmap is missing some important pieces for me to take this seriously. In either case I find drawing comparison with Planetscale to not be very helpful or illustrative of the project and its goals.

Re: Let's Build PlanetScale from Scratch: Infrastructure

#8

Post by onatm »

lewi wrote: post #6

Awesome. I've been playing exploring PITR stuff recently in my homelab. Will give it a go and try to contribute if I spot any issues

It's far from complete. This is just the infrastructure bit that I need to build the actual service. I am going to build an operator, a coordinator, an API and a CLI. I am going to continue writing posts while building them.

Re: Let's Build PlanetScale from Scratch: Infrastructure

#9

Post by whitelimetea »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #7

I think this is confusing Planetscale's primary objective: to make it incredibly easy and efficient to scale a database up and out. There's no mention of sharding whatsoever. Without that this has very little to do with Planetscale and is much closer to your average managed DB (RDS etc.). There's also no mention of a bouncer/gateway/reverse proxy, which is necessary for zero downtime. I get that Planetscale hosts "va…

Most cloud SaaS is trivial to build and run locally. Many of it is just hosted versions of what already exists.

It's like when people "build our own redis from scratch" - not a feat worth bragging about, if you hosted a high availability memory cache for apps that might be something worth sharing, but the tech is nothing.

Re: Let's Build PlanetScale from Scratch: Infrastructure

#10

Post by Shalomboy »

OP's interview with the F1 team sounds super cool, I'd actually love to hear more about their experience and the vibes they got from potentially working a dev job for a sports team. I had a close encounter with the analytics department of an MLB Team not too long ago and found that pocket of the tech world beyond fascinating. I just wish I had more exposure to the folks working in it.
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