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PlanetScale Offering $5 Databases

(planetscale.com)
231 points ryanvogel | 2 comments | 30 Oct 25 15:20 UTC | HN request time: 0.447s | source
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saxenaabhi ◴[30 Oct 25 20:20 UTC] No.45764853[source]▶
I wonder why other providers don't use metal ssd sync replication technique that planetscale uses? Most of them just default to EBS.

My interest in it peaked when I heard about NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe/TCP) and SPDK from Xata[1] and apparently with that performance is as good as planetscale metal, but planetscale found their methodology flawed[2] and they Xata never responded.

[1] https://xata.io/blog/reaction-to-the-planetscale-postgresql-...

[2] https://planetscale.com/benchmarks/xata

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samlambert ◴[30 Oct 25 21:07 UTC] No.45765364[source]▶
It's very hard to do. They all want to do it but can't so now it's their marketing team's jobs to lie to people about why they shouldn't want it.
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1. saxenaabhi ◴[30 Oct 25 21:20 UTC] No.45765517[source]▶
@samlambert what exactly makes it hard? Isn't it as simple as setting synchronous_commit=remote_apply or does planetscale have a custom strategy or are there other operational issues?

Just asking since I find it both the planetscale's engineering and its impact on competitive landscape very interesting.

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2. samlambert ◴[30 Oct 25 21:24 UTC] No.45765561[source]▶
you have to make sure you will never terminate these nodes, that you have all the operations maturity to cycle them responsibly, and resize them. I am sure they will get there one day but most people are still figuring out how to run databases on k8s so it's a long road.