Andreessen invests $22M in PlanetScale’s database-as-a-service | Hacker News Reader

Andreessen invests $22M in PlanetScale’s database-as-a-service

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139 pointsdkhenry24 comments

I really admire any DB that helps with zero effort scaling. I have immense respect for engineers that solve DB scaling problems. However i have to say this: The last DBaaS we used was FoundationDB. They left us and many others hanging dry. Ever since our blind choice has been AWS RDS Multi-AZ.

Was that a DBaaS or a DB that you deployed yourself?

I think many new databases are handling the concerns around lock-in by being Postgres or MySQL compatible. PlaneScale is MySQL compatible of course.

You know that it is open source now?

That’s not much comfort for someone looking for a DBaaS solution?

Oddly they were never a DBaaS though...

Yeah, last time I heard about FoundationDB was when it was open-sourced a year ago. The response here on HN [0] seemed quite good.

I'm curious what happened to make people feel left "hanging dry"? Guessing it's how the DBaaS was shut down.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16877395

FoundationDB themselves never offered one. Not sure if someone else did though.

What does PlanetScale use? Is it a totally new engine? FoundationDB is rock solid. The only thing that can come close is some projects based on RocksDB, like TiDB. It would be great to see some comparison.

PlanetScale is built on Vitess ( https://vitess.io ) which actually uses MySQL as the backing store, and Vitess has been deployed at Youtube, Slack, and a bunch of other companies for years ( the first commits date back to September 2010 ). It is just about as rock solid as you can get.

Hey I am on the team at PlanetScale and you are 100% correct about that. One of the great decisions we made was that our SaaS is the OSS version of Vitess so even if we went away you would still be able to continue with Vitess. Also we are working on rolling out BYOK ( bring your own Kubernetes ) as a deploy option so the databases and Vitess components all reside in your Account not in ours.

> OSS version of Vitess

Isn't Vitess already open source (Apache 2.0 from their site)? Or did you mean to say managed/hosted/DBaaS version of Vitess?

It is Apache 2 and thats the only version we will deploy, there isn't a Proprietary version that planetscale will use in the background. This isn't a fork or even a re-licensed version of Vitess. Everything we develop goes into the Apache 2 OSS project

I just spotted Chris on the Planetscale About page; I worked with him at Infomix years ago! I dropped a nite via your site's web form.

I think you'd be able to use PlanetScale in conjunction with AWS.

See: https://github.com/vitessio/vitess/issues/2518

Vitess solves a lot of the complex issues with DB scaling like horizontal partitioning and being able to use it as a complement to AWS could end up being a really nice solution.

p.s. got to meet some of the team and yeah they're super impressive.

The scaleout relational db world is definitely interesting. There's about a dozen competitors now consolidating around mysql and postgres dialects with both strategies of building on top of the native engine and building a new one to emulate it.

What does the Planetscale team see as the main differentiation with these other companies?

These guys did a presentation about running/optimizing Vitess (the tech behind Planetscale) on Kubernetes. Cool stuff.

https://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/running-a-highp...

(Vitess is barely mentioned on slide 28 but that's what the demo was running on, not sure why)

That was a talk sponsored by the EKS team at Amazon, we ( at planetscale ) were working with them and our partner to show off how well we could scale, but since it was part of the EKS track we wanted to highlight the details of Kubernetes.

Also, for a more Vitess heavy presentation also on Kubernetes. Take a look at this talk we gave at KubeCon Europe https://youtu.be/OZl4HrB9p-8

What kind of customers is PlanetScale going after and how does the product compare? This seems like a very niche product.

The product is drop in compatible with MySQL so if you are using MySQL today its likely you would see some improvement. Also if you have large data sets or if you want a Highly Available database running alongside your applications in Kubernetes it would be a good fit for you. That last case is extremely powerful. You can treat your Database as a first class k8s citizen right along side your applications and have a performant scaleable, and highly available database with no more management then what you would give any k8s application.

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