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xyzzy_plughtoday at 1:19 PM1 replyview on HN

I think this is confusing Planetscale's primary objective: to make it incredibly easy and efficient to scale a database up and out.

There's no mention of sharding whatsoever. Without that this has very little to do with Planetscale and is much closer to your average managed DB (RDS etc.). There's also no mention of a bouncer/gateway/reverse proxy, which is necessary for zero downtime.

I get that Planetscale hosts "vanilla" Postgres instances but naturally those are limited by single instance size limits. I imagine this is predominantly a marketing strategy for them, acting as a funnel for their sharding products.

But perhaps that's the goal with this project, to not be Planetscale at all, and to focus on the single node. If that's the case, then great, best of luck, but the roadmap is missing some important pieces for me to take this seriously. In either case I find drawing comparison with Planetscale to not be very helpful or illustrative of the project and its goals.


Replies

whitelimeteatoday at 1:38 PM

Most cloud SaaS is trivial to build and run locally. Many of it is just hosted versions of what already exists.

It's like when people "build our own redis from scratch" - not a feat worth bragging about, if you hosted a high availability memory cache for apps that might be something worth sharing, but the tech is nothing.