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PlanetScale for Postgres is now GA

planetscale.com

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Re: PlanetScale for Postgres is now GA

#71

Post by rcrowley »

fourseventy wrote: post #46

The way I understood NVMe drives to work on Google Cloud is that they are ephemeral and your data will be lost if the vm reboots. How do they work in this case?

You don't (typically) lose the data on the ephemeral drive across a reboot but you definitely can (and do!) when there are more permanent hardware failures. (They really happen!) That's why PlanetScale always maintains at least three copies of the data. We guarantee durability via replication, not by trusting the (slow, network-attached) block device.

I did an interview all about PlanetScale Metal a couple of months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3r9PsVwGkg4>

Re: PlanetScale for Postgres is now GA

#72

Post by DarkNova6 »

richieartoul wrote: post #66
ProofHouse wrote: post #55

Not a single explanation of what ‘PlanetScale’ is, does (or how) on that landing page. A product, a service, a new offering or scaling paradigm, a cloud? Etc Sure you can click around to determine but this always annoys me. Like everyone should know what your product is and does and all you service names. Put it front and center at the top!

It's not a landing page, it's a blog, and if you read the first few sentences of the post it becomes immediately clear what service PlanetScale provides.

The first few sentences mean absolutely squat.

> Our mission is simple: bring you the fastest and most reliable databases with the best developer experience. We have done this for 5 years now with our managed Vitess product, allowing companies like Cursor, Intercom, and Block to scale beyond previous limits.

> We are so excited to bring this to Postgres. Our proprietary operator allows us to bring the maturity of PlanetScale and the performance of Metal to an even wider audience. We bring you the best of Postgres and the best of PlanetScale in one product.

Seriously??

Re: PlanetScale for Postgres is now GA

#73

Post by n_u »

samlambert wrote: post #39
awaseem wrote: post #37

Might be a dumb question, but what is metal? Are you folks hosting DBs on your own infra or still going through AWS/GCP

hosting on AWS/GCP on the ephemeral NVMe nodes. https://planetscale.com/metal

A couple dumb questions:

1. You say "ephemeral", but my understanding is that NVMe is non-volatile so upon crash and restart we should be able to recover the state of the memory. Is is ephemeral because of how EC2 works where you might not get that same physical box and memory addresses back?

2. Can you explain what "Semi-synchronous replication" is? Your docs say "This ensures every write has reached stable storage in two availability zones before it’s acknowledged to the client." but I would call that synchronous since the write is blocked until it is replicated.

Thanks!

Re: PlanetScale for Postgres is now GA

#74

Post by rcrowley »

ohxh wrote: post #69

Took a while to find on their website but here’s a benchmark vs AWS Aurora: https://planetscale.com/benchmarks/aurora Seems a bit better, but they benchmarked on a kind of small db (500gb db / db.r8g.xlarge)

Fair to say 500GB is small, especially compared to some of the folks who've already migrated, but do note that it's 15x RAM on the benchmark machines, so we really were testing the whole database and not just the memory bandwidth of the CPUs.

Re: PlanetScale for Postgres is now GA

#75

Post by stronglikedan »

ritzaco wrote: post #17
dangoodmanUT wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PlanetScale isnt' really designed for the "ill give it a go" casual customer that might use supabase It's designed for businesses that need to haul ass

businesses that 'need to haul ass' usually still want to try something out before buying it. That doesn't need to a a free plan, but it's common to offer some trial period to new users. Also totally OK if planetscale doesn't do this and that $39/month _is_ the best way to try them out, I just think it would be good for them to make explicit in the article what I should do if I think I might want it but want to try it…

> but it's common to offer some trial period to new users

That is rather uncommon for B2B.

Re: PlanetScale for Postgres is now GA

#76

Post by arandomhuman »

mattrobenolt wrote: post #38
awaseem wrote: post #37

Might be a dumb question, but what is metal? Are you folks hosting DBs on your own infra or still going through AWS/GCP

It's still AWS/GCP, but it uses instance types with local NVMes.

so it's a "bare metal" virtual machine? Or are they actually using the bare metal offerings for the cloud provider?

Re: PlanetScale for Postgres is now GA

#77

Post by tjoekbezoer »

ProofHouse wrote: post #58
ProofHouse wrote: post #55

Not a single explanation of what ‘PlanetScale’ is, does (or how) on that landing page. A product, a service, a new offering or scaling paradigm, a cloud? Etc Sure you can click around to determine but this always annoys me. Like everyone should know what your product is and does and all you service names. Put it front and center at the top!

I mean add a 1-2 sentence description of the HOW to this paragraph. Cause like great, but how. This is just marketing fluff and a user has to navigate the site to then understand what PlanetScale itself does (and how), if not familiar; What is PlanetScale for Postgres? Our mission is simple: bring you the fastest and most reliable databases with the best developer experience. We have done this for 5 years now with ou…

Well, above the fold in the chapter 'What is PlanetScale for Postgres?' the second paragraph mentions custom operator. That makes me assume it is kubernetes.

Re: PlanetScale for Postgres is now GA

#78

Post by samlambert »

tjoekbezoer wrote: post #77
ProofHouse wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean add a 1-2 sentence description of the HOW to this paragraph. Cause like great, but how. This is just marketing fluff and a user has to navigate the site to then understand what PlanetScale itself does (and how), if not familiar; What is PlanetScale for Postgres? Our mission is simple: bring you the fastest and most reliable databases with the best developer experience. We have done this for 5 years now with ou…

Well, above the fold in the chapter 'What is PlanetScale for Postgres?' the second paragraph mentions custom operator. That makes me assume it is kubernetes.

it is kubernetes

Re: PlanetScale for Postgres is now GA

#79

Post by n_u »

rcrowley wrote: post #71
fourseventy wrote: post #46

The way I understood NVMe drives to work on Google Cloud is that they are ephemeral and your data will be lost if the vm reboots. How do they work in this case?

You don't (typically) lose the data on the ephemeral drive across a reboot but you definitely can (and do!) when there are more permanent hardware failures. (They really happen!) That's why PlanetScale always maintains at least three copies of the data. We guarantee durability via replication, not by trusting the (slow, network-attached) block device. I did an interview all about PlanetScale Metal a couple of months…

Hi, thank you for your work on this and being willing to answer questions on it.

"We guarantee durability via replication". I've starting noticing this pattern more where distributed systems provide durability by replicating data rather than writing it to disk and achieving the best of both worlds. I'm curious

1. Is there a name for this technique?

2. How do you calculate your availability? This blog post[1] has some rough details but I'd love to see the math.

3. I'm guessing a key part of this is putting the replicas in different AZs and assuming failures aren't correlated so you can multiply the probabilities directly. How do you validate that failures across AZs are statistically independent?

Thanks!

[1] https://planetscale.com/blog/planetscale-metal-theres-no-rep...

Re: PlanetScale for Postgres is now GA

#80

Post by zenerdi0de »

rcrowley wrote: post #71
fourseventy wrote: post #46

The way I understood NVMe drives to work on Google Cloud is that they are ephemeral and your data will be lost if the vm reboots. How do they work in this case?

You don't (typically) lose the data on the ephemeral drive across a reboot but you definitely can (and do!) when there are more permanent hardware failures. (They really happen!) That's why PlanetScale always maintains at least three copies of the data. We guarantee durability via replication, not by trusting the (slow, network-attached) block device. I did an interview all about PlanetScale Metal a couple of months…

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