Hacker News Reader

Comment by t43562 | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why but I can almost never understand American commercial software websites. "what is PlanetScale".....blah, blah blah....WHOOOOSH! No more enlightened than before. Even for products I've worked on - I read the page and can't recognise the thing I'm working on from the description.....

Postgres is involved somehow. I get that.

View on HN

i'll take the opposite side. i was very impressed with their website.

the very first line:

> The world’s fastest and most scalable cloud databases

the second line:

> PlanetScale brings you the fastest databases available in the cloud. Both our Postgres and Vitess databases deliver exceptional speed and reliability, with Vitess adding ultra scalability through horizontal sharding.

i know exactly what they do. zero fluff. and, i'm now interested.

https://planetscale.com/

How is this different than Aurora Postgres or RDS Postgres?

Everyone keeps asking this but AFAIK they're an alternative database host. If you're a company you can compare their pricing and availability to RDS and other companies. If you have an open AWS contract, or a hobbyist developer who already has databases on AWS you might not see any reason to switch away.

There are a lot of differences between Aurora/RDS and PlanetScale I could talk about, some but I'll point to just one for now: PlanetScale offers Metal databases, which means blazing fast NVMe drives attached directly to the host where Postgres is running. This gives you faster reads and writes than what either Aurora or RDS can achieve with their network-attached block storage. Check out our benchmarks: https://planetscale.com/blog/benchmarking-postgres

Also, the architecture of Aurora is very different from PlanetScale's:

* AWS Aurora uses storage-level replication, rather than traditional Postgres replication. This architecture has the benefit that a change made on an Aurora primary is visible very quickly on the read replicas. * PlanetScale is a "shared nothing" architecture using what I would call traditional methods of data replication, where the primary and the replicas have independent copies of the data. This means that replication lag is a possibility customers must consider, whereas Aurora customers mostly ignore this. * If you set up 3 AWS RDS Postgres instances in separate availability zones and set up replication between them, that would be roughly similar to PlanetScale's architecture.

This is an incredibly good example of what I wanted to know.

This is really what I meant. They must offer more than a copy of postgres running on a computer. How do they scale? What are the features? Why would I choose this over RDS for example?

Scaling postgres is not that informative. I am sorry if I annoyed the people working on it. I think the USP could be explained more obviously.

It's a reasonable question. I think it's too early days for us to be able to provide a feature-by-feature breakdown of PlanetScale Postgres vs. Aurora/RDS. Our stated mission on day 1 (today) is to be the fastest and most reliable Postgres provider out there. The benchmarks we've provided are the clearest, data-driven thing we can point to right now in support of that.

More features will come later on which I think will set us apart even more from RDS, Aurora and other providers, but too early to talk about those.

Beyond features, there are other reasons you might choose us. For example, we've built a reputation on being having excellent reliability/uptime, with exceptionally good support. These are harder to back up with hard data, but our customer testimonials are a good testament to this.

Baseless marketing claims aren't considered fluff?

People can disagree with the claims of course, but I don't think they are baseless.

On the Postgres side: https://planetscale.com/blog/benchmarking-postgres

On the Vitess side, I would point to our customers, who, on individual databases, have achieved pretty high QPS (millions), on large datasets (100s of TiBs), at a latency that is lower than what other DBaaS providers can offer: https://planetscale.com/case-studies/cash-app

It's fluff to give the elevator pitch now guys, be warned

idk in the linked post it literally says this in the 2nd paragraph:

> Our mission is simple: bring you the fastest and most reliable databases with the best developer experience.

The homepage splash of this company is literally a few paragraphs that explain exactly what the company does. The problem might be you.

But it's done at a scale that's planetscale

is this web scale?

It's not as fast as dev null though

planet bigger than web

Reply on news.ycombinator.com