
Andreessen invests $22M in PlanetScale’s database-as-a-service - dkhenry
https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/23/planetscale-vitess/
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samdung
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.

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dkhenry
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.

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paxys
> 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?

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dkhenry
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

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manigandham
The scaleout relational db world is definitely interesting. There's about a
dozen competitors now consolidating around mysql and postgres dialects with
both strategies of building on top of the native engine and building a new one
to emulate it.

What does the Planetscale team see as the main differentiation with these
other companies?

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cozos
These guys did a presentation about running/optimizing Vitess (the tech behind
Planetscale) on Kubernetes. Cool stuff.

[https://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/running-a-
highp...](https://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/running-a-
highperformance-kubernetes-cluster-with-amazon-eks-con318r1-aws-reinvent-2018)

(Vitess is barely mentioned on slide 28 but that's what the demo was running
on, not sure why)

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dkhenry
That was a talk sponsored by the EKS team at Amazon, we ( at planetscale )
were working with them and our partner to show off how well we could scale,
but since it was part of the EKS track we wanted to highlight the details of
Kubernetes.

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dkhenry
Also, for a more Vitess heavy presentation also on Kubernetes. Take a look at
this talk we gave at KubeCon Europe
[https://youtu.be/OZl4HrB9p-8](https://youtu.be/OZl4HrB9p-8)

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iblaine
What kind of customers is PlanetScale going after and how does the product
compare? This seems like a very niche product.

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dkhenry
The product is drop in compatible with MySQL so if you are using MySQL today
its likely you would see some improvement. Also if you have large data sets or
if you want a Highly Available database running alongside your applications in
Kubernetes it would be a good fit for you. That last case is extremely
powerful. You can treat your Database as a first class k8s citizen right along
side your applications and have a performant scaleable, and highly available
database with no more management then what you would give any k8s application.

