Update: PlanetScale for Postgres is now Generally Available.
Today we are announcing the private preview of PlanetScale for Postgres: the world’s fastest Postgres hosting platform.
We are already hosting customers' production workloads with incredible results. Convex, the complete backend solution for app developers, is migrating their reactive database infrastructure to PlanetScale for Postgres. Read more about their migration here.
Never say never
PlanetScale has been successful hosting some of the world’s largest relational databases, so why are we building for Postgres? The reason is simple: customer demand. In March we announced PlanetScale Metal and something wild happened. We had an immense number of companies reaching out to us asking us to support Postgres. The demand was so overwhelming that by the end of launch day we knew we had to do this. We are nothing without our customers, we do the difficult but boring bit of providing industry leading uptime so they can build incredible products. We want more and more exciting companies building on PlanetScale.
Performance and reliability
Our initial goal was to convince ourselves we could be additive to the ecosystem and provide something of value. We spoke to over 50 customers of the current Postgres hosting platforms and we heard identical stories of regular outages, poor performance, and high cost. PlanetScale is an engineering company. We are not going to enter a market with anything but exceptional engineering.
We had to validate we could out-perform the current solutions while being more reliable. This led us to building a comprehensive benchmark methodology. After extensive testing we are proud to share that we consistently outperform every Postgres product on the market, even when giving the competition 2x the resources:
PlanetScale for Postgres uses real Postgres running on our proprietary operator meaning we can bring the maturity of PlanetScale and the performance of Metal to an even wider audience. Today's release already achieves true high availability with automatic failovers, query buffering, and connection pooling via our proprietary proxy layer, which includes PgBouncer for connection pooling. We run Postgres v17 and support online imports from any version > Postgres v13, as well as automatic Postgres version updates without downtime. Additionally, PlanetScale Metal’s locally-attached NVMe SSD drives fundamentally change the performance/cost ratio for hosting relational databases in the cloud. We’re excited to bring this performance to Postgres.
Neki: Vitess for Postgres
Vitess is one of PlanetScale’s greatest strengths and has become synonymous with database scaling. Contemporary Vitess is the product of PlanetScale’s experience running at extreme scale. We have made explicit sharding accessible to hundreds of thousands of users and it is time to bring this power to Postgres. We will not however be using Vitess to do this.
Vitess’ achievements are enabled by leveraging MySQL’s strengths and engineering around its weaknesses. To achieve Vitess’ power for Postgres we are architecting from first principles. We are well under way with building this new system and will be releasing more information and early access as we progress. As with all PlanetScale products we work with customers at scale to build and validate maturity. If your company runs Postgres at a significant scale and this is something that interests you, reach out. You can also sign up for the Neki waitlist at neki.dev to stay updated on our progress.
We are incredibly excited to be a part of the vibrant and thriving Postgres community.