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Comment by anoojb | Hacker News Reader

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?

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I had the same latency concerns when I heard about this PaaS DB trend, but you’ll note that this runs in the AWS (soon GCP) region of your choice, so if you’re hosted there, it should be about the same latency as using their managed DB service.

If you aren’t hosting the app in the same AWS/GCP region then I still have the same question.

> so if you’re hosted there, it should be about the same latency as using their managed DB service.

yes and no. In my AWS account I can explicitly pick an AZ (us-east-2a, us-east-2b or us-east-2c) but Availability Zones are not consistent between AWS accounts.

See https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ram/latest/userguide/working-wit...

But that's exactly why they introduced the AZ IDs (use1-az1 as opposed to us-east-1a), so you can tell whether you're really in the same zone, regardless of the name you see in a particular account.

Ah, thanks Internet stranger. TIL.

PlanetScale operates databases in AWS and GCP. There's no network latency penalty for choosing PlanetScale if you're hosting your app in one of those cloud providers (and in one of the many regions we operate in).

More importantly, no bandwidth charge penalty. As leaving AWS isn't inexpensive.

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.

It depends a bit on your cloud provider but some of them have an offering that doesn't always match your needs or their pricing might be much more expensive at equal performance.

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