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