How is this different than Aurora Postgres or RDS Postgres?

maxenglander 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

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.

	▲	t43562 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		This is an incredibly good example of what I wanted to know.

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mapmeld 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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t43562 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

	▲	maxenglander 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		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.