In this episode, I chat with Richard Crowley from PlanetScale about their new offering: PlanetScale Metal.
We dive deep into the performance and reliability trade-offs of EBS vs. locally attached NVMe storage,
and how Metal delivers game-changing speed for MySQL workloads.
Links:
- Database School: https://databaseschool.com
- PlanetScale: https://planetscale.com
- PlanetScale Metal: https://planetscale.com/blog/announcing-metal
Follow Richard:
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/rcrowley
- Website: https://rcrowley.org
Follow Aaron:
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aarondfrancis
- Website: https://aaronfrancis.com — find articles, podcasts, courses, and more.
Chapters:
00:00 - Intro: What is PlanetScale Metal?
00:39 - Meet Richard Crowley
01:33 - What is Vitess and how does it work?
03:00 - Where PlanetScale fits into the picture
09:03 - Why EBS is the default and its trade-offs
13:03 - How PlanetScale handles durability without EBS
16:03 - The engineering work behind PlanetScale Metal
22:00 - Deep dive into backups, restores, and availability math
25:03 - How PlanetScale replaces instances safely
27:11 - Performance gains with Metal: Latency and IOPS explained
32:03 - Database workloads that truly benefit from Metal
39:10 - The myth of the infinite cloud
41:08 - How PlanetScale plans for capacity
43:02 - Multi-tenant vs. PlanetScale Managed
44:02 - Who should use Metal and when?
46:05 - Pricing trade-offs and when Metal becomes cheaper
48:27 - Scaling vertically vs. sharding
49:57 - What’s next for PlanetScale Metal?
53:32 - Where to learn more