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 community is generally positive about PlanetScale's technical capabilities and the GA launch, particularly impressed by the NVMe/Metal architecture and the detailed technical responses from engineers. However, there is notable skepticism about marketing claims, frustration with the lack of a free tier, and mixed reactions to the CEO's combative engagement style. The extensive MySQL vs Postgres debate is collegial and informative, with most participants ultimately favoring Postgres for new projects.

In Agreement

• Early adopters report significant performance improvements after migrating, with smooth migration experiences and excellent weekend support responsiveness
• PlanetScale's NVMe-based Metal architecture provides genuine performance advantages over EBS-based solutions like Aurora and RDS by eliminating network storage latency
• The durability model using three-way replication across availability zones with semi-synchronous writes is sound engineering
• Neki (Postgres sharding inspired by Vitess) addresses a real gap since horizontal scaling options for Postgres are far less mature than MySQL's
• PlanetScale engineers' detailed technical answers in the thread demonstrate deep expertise and strong community engagement

Opposed

• The blog post and marketing copy fail to clearly explain what PlanetScale is and how it differs from Aurora, RDS, or other Postgres hosting options
• The 'unlimited IOPS' claim is misleading since AWS VMs impose I/O bandwidth limits proportional to instance size
• Removing the free/hobby tier means developers cannot easily evaluate the product before committing $39/month
• At its core, PlanetScale Postgres is managed Postgres on better hardware rather than a fundamentally new technology
• The CEO's combative responses to criticism in the thread reflect poorly on company culture