Comparing AWS's RDS and PlanetScale | Hacker News Reader

Comparing AWS's RDS and PlanetScale

planetscale.com

57 pointsgagejustins14 comments

Great comparison, but i feel like it would be fair to mention support for foreign key constraints in the overview table (which planetscale doesn‘t have, afaik)

Offensive to leave to that out ;)

"We make some things easier for developers but you will have to deal with concurrent updates in your application"

Also no CTEs or window functions. More like MySQL 5.x support than 8.x.

https://vitess.io/docs/reference/compatibility/mysql-compati...

No transactions across shards is a bummer as well. Feels like planetscale might not be the best choice for small to medium projects, despite their improvements in developer experience.

In practice this doesn't turn out to be a major issue, since a good design will keep >99% of queries/transactions on a single shard.

4 years of Vitess in prod, also a maintainer

The “Trusted by” page has some pretty impressive flagship companies (GitHub, Slack, Square, AirBnb). Is anyone familiar with the role in which Planetscale is used at those companies? (Unless that is advertising users of vitess vs the hosted offering).

i would assume it‘s the latter

edit: see the case studies linked here https://planetscale.com/enterprise

I believe most of those are self-hosted Vitess with Planetscale providing technical resources and support.

If one only needs a database, it's probably not worth to go to AWS due the unnecessary complexity.

Now if you're using other services, be aware of egress costs, which are not mentioned in the article.

> If one only needs a database, it's probably not worth to go to AWS

I think PlanetScale is built for someone who isn't using raw machines to build an app or running a dev-ops org.

Something like Vercel+PlanetScale is more along the lines of tooling you're likely to use (or Heroku if you're dealing with existing code).

The egress costs are rarely an issue for API endpoints, unless you're serving assets out of the hosts.

There's a million intranet-like workflow apps which don't need the additional headache of maintaining an RDS (or the skills to secure IAM). Mostly state machines with click-next-to-continue - Airtable probably hits the same demographic.

I think PlanetScale has got to work on their pricing model if the assumption is that it is ideal for that sort of an app (it's not "attractive" to switch right now & there's no pricing protection plans), but I'm not an economist or sales guy - like look at Google Fi bandwidth pricing for an example of where I overpay for data.

Does anyone have a good reference to a comparison of the two products that isn't written by someone with a strong financial incentive for you to pick one over the other?

The main issue that doesn't seem to be reflected here is that it's really hard to have a database and your application in different locations. Latency and security are big components in the general equation and both might be affected by this.

(This is the same reason why, although there are excellent Redis-as-a-service products, it's hard to justify to use them at all.)

This is how you beat Amazon/AWS, you go for the 40 percent where they fall behind in their products and make it better. They have a broad set of tooling not a particularly deep set of tooling.

Isn't Aurora a better apple to apple comparisonm

Reply on news.ycombinator.com