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$50 PlanetScale Metal Is GA for Postgres

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Re: $50 PlanetScale Metal Is GA for Postgres

#41

Post by carlm42 »

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.

Yeah per your edit that'd be for 256GB RAM which puts that into serious dollar category. For comparison I checked what AWS asks for for the same spec and that'd be $4616/month (for a db.m8gd.16xlarge), and that doesn't even yield you an actual NVMe. You can of course build the same for cheaper on Hetzner but again then you're on the hook also for the operations of the thing, which at that size is possibly non-trivial.

Re: $50 PlanetScale Metal Is GA for Postgres

#42

Post by everfrustrated »

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.

You're not paying for the infra, you're paying for not having to hire people who would have had to build/manage/test/operate/secure it.

Re: $50 PlanetScale Metal Is GA for Postgres

#44

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

Re: $50 PlanetScale Metal Is GA for Postgres

#45

Post by FancyFane »

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?

From the PlanetScale perspective keep in mind the ability to shard. What happens when the largest single node Aurora instance can no longer keep up with application/traffic demands?

I ask because we see it more often than not, and for that situation sharding the workflow is the best answer. Why have one MySQL instance responding to request when you could have 2,4,8...128, etc MySQL instances responding as a single database instance? They also have the ability to vertically scale each of the shards in that database as it's needed.

Re: $50 PlanetScale Metal Is GA for Postgres

#46

Post by dig1 »

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.

1 GB of RAM for Postgres is really only useful for tinkering IMHO. Even for development, you’ll quickly need more memory, so HA doesn’t provide much value here. If you go with something even remotely reasonable (4 GB RAM, 200 GB SSD, 1/2 vCPU — and that’s still on the low end), the cost jumps to about $290/month. For that price, you could easily hire someone to set up HA Postgres for you on Hetzner or OVH and once configured, HA Postgres typically requires minimal ongoing maintenance.

Also, this is a shared server, not a truly dedicated one like you’d get with bare-metal providers. So, calling it "Metal" might be misleading marketing trick, but if you want someone to always blame and don’t mind overpaying for that comfort, then the managed option might be the right thing.

Re: $50 PlanetScale Metal Is GA for Postgres

#47

Post by mjb »

taw1285 wrote: post #29

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

I don't think either is a bad choice, but Aurora has some advantages if you're not a DB expert. Starting with Aurora Serverless:

- Aurora storage scales with your needs, meaning that you don't need to worry about running out of space as your data grows. - Aurora will auto-scale CPU and memory based on the needs of your application, within the bounds you set. It does this without any downtime, or even dropping connections. You don't have to worry about choosing the right CPU and memory up-front, and for most applications you can simply adjust your limits as you go. This is great for applications that are growing over time, or for applications with daily or weekly cycles of usage.

The other Aurora option is Aurora DSQL. The advantages of picking DSQL are:

- A generous free tier to get you going with development. - Scale-to-zero and scale-up, on storage, CPU, and memory. If you aren't sending any traffic to your database it costs you nothing (except storage), and you can scale up to millions of transactions per second with no changes. - No infrastructure to configure or manage, no updates, no thinking about replicas, etc. You don't have to understand CPU or memory ratios, think about software versions, think about primaries and secondaries, or any of that stuff. High availability, scaling of reads and writes, patching, etc is all built-in.

Re: $50 PlanetScale Metal Is GA for Postgres

#48

Post by wackget »

If anyone from Planetscale is reading this, please know I hate what you did to your website. I previously had it bookmarked as an example of excellent, usable website design. About a year ago it turned into a plaintext nightmare. The first time I saw the new design I genuinely thought that a CSS file had failed to load in my browser. It's awful.

*Edit:* It also fails to load other pages if you have JavaScript or XHR disabled.

Re: $50 PlanetScale Metal Is GA for Postgres

#49

Post by rcrowley »

JoshGlazebrook wrote: post #31
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?

Yes, you can certainly use up your CPU allocation on an M-10 database (at which point we offer online resizing as large as you want to go, all the way up to 192 CPUs and 1.5TiB RAM). Even still, I've been able to coax more than 10,000 IOPS from an M-10. (Actually, out of dozens of M-10s colocated on the same hardware all hammering away.)

You can get a lot more out of that CPU allocation with the fast I/O of a local NVMe drive than from the slow I/O of an EBS volume.

Re: $50 PlanetScale Metal Is GA for Postgres

#50

Post by solatic »

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.

> $4529/month... can indeed just hire someone full-time

That's $54,348/year, not including the cost of benefits, not including stock compensation. Let's say you reserve 20% for benefits and that comes out to $43,478.40 in salary.

Besides the benefit of not needing the management / communication overhead of hiring somebody, do you know any DBAs willing to take a full-time job for $43,478.40 in salary?

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