PlanetScale for Postgres Is GA, With Neki Sharding on the Horizon

PlanetScale has made its Postgres offering generally available, with easy setup and migration resources. It brings PlanetScale’s operational expertise and performance to Postgres, already validated by numerous production customers. The company also previewed Neki, a from-scratch Postgres sharding solution that will be open-sourced and is currently waitlisted.

Key Points

• PlanetScale for Postgres is now generally available with straightforward onboarding and migration support.
• The product combines Postgres with PlanetScale’s operational maturity and a proprietary operator for high performance and reliability.
• Hundreds of companies are already running production workloads, with several public customer case studies cited.
• Neki is PlanetScale’s forthcoming Postgres sharding solution, designed from first principles and to be open-sourced when ready.
• Sales-assisted pathways exist for large or complex migrations.

Sentiment

The overall sentiment of the Hacker News discussion is largely positive and highly engaged. Early adopters offered strong endorsements, praising the product's performance. While some concerns were raised regarding pricing, trial access, and technical scaling specifics, these were met with transparent and informative responses from PlanetScale representatives, leading to clarification and a constructive dialogue.

In Agreement

• Early access users, like bekacru, reported excellent performance for critical workloads, stating it's 'setting a new standard for what highly performant managed Postgres should look like'.
• The product is recognized as being designed for businesses that require high performance and reliability ('need to haul ass'), aligning with its target market.
• The clarification about the GA product's strong vertical scaling capabilities on 'Metal' and the future introduction of Neki for horizontal write scaling was well-received, addressing initial questions about scaling strategy.
• The PlanetScale team actively engaged in the discussion, promptly answering questions about extensions, scaling, and migration, and correcting a minor title inaccuracy.

Opposed

• Several users expressed concern about the lack of a clear free trial or a more affordable entry point for new users to 'give it a spin' before committing to plans starting at $39/month, despite recognizing the target audience.
• Questions were raised regarding PlanetScale's specific optimizations for common Postgres issues like index bloat on high-insert workloads and XID wraparound, though the team noted bloat detection and efficient autovacuum on their Metal product.