The world of cloud databases is evolving quickly, and PlanetScale’s announcement of private preview support for PostgreSQL is a major development. With a focus on speed, reliability, and a commitment to customer-driven innovation, PlanetScale is aiming to offer the fastest and most robust Postgres hosting available. Ambitious companies like Convex have already begun migrating their production workloads, highlighting the industry’s confidence in this new database service.
Why PlanetScale Entered the Postgres Market
PlanetScale’s move into the Postgres ecosystem is a direct response to overwhelming customer demand. After the successful launch of PlanetScale Metal, customers flooded the company with requests to support Postgres.
Recognizing that true innovation comes from listening to users, PlanetScale invested in building a platform designed to empower the growing Postgres community. Their goal: enable developers to build with unprecedented confidence and performance.
Performance and Reliability Take Center Stage
Before expanding, PlanetScale set a high bar for itself. Conversations with dozens of Postgres users revealed widespread frustration with existing hosting solutions, outages, unpredictable performance, and steep costs were common complaints.
Determined to address these pain points, PlanetScale developed rigorous benchmarking tests to compare its platform directly with competitors.
- Benchmark results: PlanetScale consistently outperformed leading services like Amazon Aurora, AlloyDB, Neon/Lakebase, Supabase, Heroku, Crunchy Data, and TigerData; even when those platforms had double the resources.
- Real Postgres, enhanced: The platform runs actual Postgres on a proprietary operator, merging PlanetScale’s proven infrastructure with the power of Metal for top-tier performance.
- High availability: Features include automatic failovers, query buffering, and advanced connection pooling via the PSBouncer proxy layer.
- Seamless upgrades: Users benefit from zero-downtime version updates and can import from any Postgres version above v13 without hassle.
- Breakthrough hardware: By leveraging locally-attached NVMe SSD drives, PlanetScale Metal delivers unmatched performance-to-cost efficiency for relational databases in the cloud.
Building on Vitess Principles: A Fresh Approach for Postgres
PlanetScale’s reputation for scalability stems from Vitess, its open-source clustering solution for MySQL. But for Postgres, the company is pioneering a new approach. Rather than applying Vitess directly, PlanetScale is constructing a platform tailored to Postgres’s unique architecture and strengths. This strategy is designed to make next-level sharding and scalability accessible to Postgres users, without compromise.
The company is actively collaborating with customers managing large-scale workloads, refining the platform through real-world feedback. Organizations interested in shaping the future of Postgres hosting can participate in PlanetScale’s early access program.
Takeaway: A Game-Changer for Postgres in the Cloud
PlanetScale’s expansion into Postgres hosting marks a bold step toward redefining what developers can expect from cloud databases. By listening to the community and leveraging deep engineering expertise, PlanetScale is positioned to set new industry standards for performance, reliability, and scalability. Early adopters have the opportunity to influence the platform’s evolution and benefit from innovations that have already transformed PlanetScale’s MySQL offerings.
About PlanetScale
PlanetScale is rapidly setting a new standard in the world of cloud databases with its intense focus on performance, reliability, and scalability. Originally celebrated for its expertise in scaling MySQL with the powerful open-source clustering solution, Vitess, the company has recently expanded to support PostgreSQL.
The platform's key differentiator lies in its superior engineering and breakthrough hardware. By utilizing locally-attached NVMe SSD drives, PlanetScale delivers unmatched performance that consistently outperforms other leading database hosts in rigorous benchmarks. For developers, this means access to features like automatic failovers, seamless zero-downtime upgrades, and a robust infrastructure designed to handle demanding workloads.
Instead of simply porting its existing solutions, PlanetScale is building a new platform tailored to Postgres's unique architecture, aiming to make next-generation scalability and sharding accessible to all.
Source:PlanetScale for Postgres
PlanetScale Launches Fastest Postgres Hosting