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I really admire any DB that helps with zero effort scaling. I have immense respect for engineers that solve DB scaling problems. However i have to say this: The

I really admire any DB that helps with zero effort scaling. I have immense respect for engineers that solve DB scaling problems. However i have to say this: The last DBaaS we used was FoundationDB. They left us and many others hanging dry. Ever since our blind choice has been AWS RDS Multi-AZ.

gregwebs 7y ago
Was that a DBaaS or a DB that you deployed yourself? I think many new databases are handling the concerns around lock-in by being Postgres or MySQL compatible. PlaneScale is MySQL compatible of course.
spullara 7y ago
You know that it is open source now?
- pavlov 7y ago
  That’s not much comfort for someone looking for a DBaaS solution?
  - spullara 7y ago
    Oddly they were never a DBaaS though...
- lioeters 7y ago
  Yeah, last time I heard about FoundationDB was when it was open-sourced a year ago. The response here on HN [0] seemed quite good. I'm curious what happened to make people feel left "hanging dry"? Guessing it's how the DBaaS was shut down. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16877395 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16877395
  - spullara 7y ago
    FoundationDB themselves never offered one. Not sure if someone else did though.
StreamBright 7y ago
What does PlanetScale use? Is it a totally new engine? FoundationDB is rock solid. The only thing that can come close is some projects based on RocksDB, like TiDB. It would be great to see some comparison.
- dkhenry 7y ago
  PlanetScale is built on Vitess ( https://vitess.io https://vitess.io ) which actually uses MySQL as the backing store, and Vitess has been deployed at Youtube, Slack, and a bunch of other companies for years ( the first commits date back to September 2010 ). It is just about as rock solid as you can get.
dkhenry 7y ago
Hey I am on the team at PlanetScale and you are 100% correct about that. One of the great decisions we made was that our SaaS is the OSS version of Vitess so even if we went away you would still be able to continue with Vitess. Also we are working on rolling out BYOK ( bring your own Kubernetes ) as a deploy option so the databases and Vitess components all reside in your Account not in ours.
- paxys 7y ago
  > OSS version of Vitess Isn't Vitess already open source (Apache 2.0 from their site)? Or did you mean to say managed/hosted/DBaaS version of Vitess?
  - dkhenry 7y ago
    It is Apache 2 and thats the only version we will deploy, there isn't a Proprietary version that planetscale will use in the background. This isn't a fork or even a re-licensed version of Vitess. Everything we develop goes into the Apache 2 OSS project
- DrScump 7y ago
  I just spotted Chris on the Planetscale About page; I worked with him at Infomix years ago! I dropped a nite via your site's web form.
stephenhuh 7y ago
I think you'd be able to use PlanetScale in conjunction with AWS. See: https://github.com/vitessio/vitess/issues/2518 https://github.com/vitessio/vitess/issues/2518 Vitess solves a lot of the complex issues with DB scaling like horizontal partitioning and being able to use it as a complement to AWS could end up being a really nice solution. p.s. got to meet some of the team and yeah they're super impressive.

gregwebs 7y ago

Was that a DBaaS or a DB that you deployed yourself? I think many new databases are handling the concerns around lock-in by being Postgres or MySQL compatible. PlaneScale is MySQL compatible of course.

spullara 7y ago

You know that it is open source now?

pavlov 7y ago
That’s not much comfort for someone looking for a DBaaS solution?
- spullara 7y ago
  Oddly they were never a DBaaS though...
lioeters 7y ago
Yeah, last time I heard about FoundationDB was when it was open-sourced a year ago. The response here on HN [0] seemed quite good. I'm curious what happened to make people feel left "hanging dry"? Guessing it's how the DBaaS was shut down. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16877395 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16877395
- spullara 7y ago
  FoundationDB themselves never offered one. Not sure if someone else did though.

StreamBright 7y ago

What does PlanetScale use? Is it a totally new engine? FoundationDB is rock solid. The only thing that can come close is some projects based on RocksDB, like TiDB. It would be great to see some comparison.

dkhenry 7y ago
PlanetScale is built on Vitess ( https://vitess.io https://vitess.io ) which actually uses MySQL as the backing store, and Vitess has been deployed at Youtube, Slack, and a bunch of other companies for years ( the first commits date back to September 2010 ). It is just about as rock solid as you can get.

dkhenry 7y ago

Hey I am on the team at PlanetScale and you are 100% correct about that. One of the great decisions we made was that our SaaS is the OSS version of Vitess so even if we went away you would still be able to continue with Vitess. Also we are working on rolling out BYOK ( bring your own Kubernetes ) as a deploy option so the databases and Vitess components all reside in your Account not in ours.

paxys 7y ago
> OSS version of Vitess Isn't Vitess already open source (Apache 2.0 from their site)? Or did you mean to say managed/hosted/DBaaS version of Vitess?
- dkhenry 7y ago
  It is Apache 2 and thats the only version we will deploy, there isn't a Proprietary version that planetscale will use in the background. This isn't a fork or even a re-licensed version of Vitess. Everything we develop goes into the Apache 2 OSS project
DrScump 7y ago
I just spotted Chris on the Planetscale About page; I worked with him at Infomix years ago! I dropped a nite via your site's web form.

stephenhuh 7y ago

I think you'd be able to use PlanetScale in conjunction with AWS. See: https://github.com/vitessio/vitess/issues/2518 https://github.com/vitessio/vitess/issues/2518 Vitess solves a lot of the complex issues with DB scaling like horizontal partitioning and being able to use it as a complement to AWS could end up being a really nice solution. p.s. got to meet some of the team and yeah they're super impressive.