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$50 PlanetScale Metal Is GA for Postgres

planetscale.com

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Re: $50 PlanetScale Metal Is GA for Postgres

#21

Post by wrs »

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?

I had the same latency concerns when I heard about this PaaS DB trend, but you’ll note that this runs in the AWS (soon GCP) region of your choice, so if you’re hosted there, it should be about the same latency as using their managed DB service.

If you aren’t hosting the app in the same AWS/GCP region then I still have the same question.

Re: $50 PlanetScale Metal Is GA for Postgres

#22

Post by carlm42 »

unbelievably wrote: post #18

$50 bucks gets you an EIGHTH of a vCPU, 1GB RAM, and 10GB SSD??? This is quite frankly highway robbery. Not to mention the laughable bandwidth. Hetzner will give you 16 vCPU, 32GB RAM, and 640GB SSD for less than that. We're talking over an order of magnitude difference in value here.

On Hetzner you will be on the hook for managing the database though, and DBA is most certainly a full-time job if you have a serious use-case for it.

Re: $50 PlanetScale Metal Is GA for Postgres

#23

Post by rcrowley »

solatic wrote: post #12
samlambert wrote: post #3

Really excited for more people to get to use Metal. Let me know if you have any questions.

Do such small caps on CPU/RAM mean that multiple customers are sharing the same server? Is there concern for noisy neighbors here, either IOPS or in case another customer's workload grows to take the full available storage on the NVMe? What kind of downtime would be needed to switch to a larger size?

We've engineered in protections from noisy neighbors in both CPU and I/O usage and we do not over-commit resources.

If your or another customer's workload grows and needs to size up we launch three whole new database servers of the appropriate size (whether that's more CPU+RAM, more storage, or both), restore the most recent backups there, catch up on replication, and then orchestrate changing the primary.

Downtime when you resize typically amounts to needing to reconnect i.e. it's negligible.

Re: $50 PlanetScale Metal Is GA for Postgres

#25

Post by rcrowley »

ngalstyan4 wrote: post #4

Sounds cool! Would be curious to know what the underlying aws ec2 instance is. Is each DB on a dedicated instance? If not, are there per-customer iops bounds?

We run on the same instance types the larger PlanetScale Metal sizes offer as whole instances. For Intel that's r6id, i4i, i7i, i3en, and i7ie. For ARM that's r8gd, i8g, and i8ge. (Right now, at least. AWS is always cookin' up new instance types.) Same story will soon be true for GCP.

Re: $50 PlanetScale Metal Is GA for Postgres

#27

Post by unbelievably »

carlm42 wrote: post #22
unbelievably wrote: post #18

$50 bucks gets you an EIGHTH of a vCPU, 1GB RAM, and 10GB SSD??? This is quite frankly highway robbery. Not to mention the laughable bandwidth. Hetzner will give you 16 vCPU, 32GB RAM, and 640GB SSD for less than that. We're talking over an order of magnitude difference in value here.

On Hetzner you will be on the hook for managing the database though, and DBA is most certainly a full-time job if you have a serious use-case for it.

Considering they are charging an unfathomable $4529/mo for 256 GB databases, extrapolating that to a serious use case you can indeed just hire someone full-time with how much you'd save. And then you'll actually have someone who understands how databases work instead of treating it like an expensive black box.

edit: my bad that's the price for 256GB RAM.

Re: $50 PlanetScale Metal Is GA for Postgres

#30

Post by tempest_ »

unbelievably wrote: post #27
carlm42 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Hetzner you will be on the hook for managing the database though, and DBA is most certainly a full-time job if you have a serious use-case for it.

Considering they are charging an unfathomable $4529/mo for 256 GB databases, extrapolating that to a serious use case you can indeed just hire someone full-time with how much you'd save. And then you'll actually have someone who understands how databases work instead of treating it like an expensive black box. edit: my bad that's the price for 256GB RAM.

Cloud databases have been pricey for a while.

The reality most databases are tiny as shit and most apps can tolerate the massive latency that the cloud provider dbs offer.

It is why it is sorta funny we are rediscovering non network attached storage is faster.

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