PlanetScale Metal

Exactly one week after I began working at PlanetScale, I pitched the CEO on what he’d soon name PlanetScale Metal. The pitch was simple: What if we ran Vitess the way I ran it at Slack, with fast, local SSD storage, instead of the slow way, using EBS? That pitch bought me the space to develop a prototype and some spreadsheets modeling cost and reliability. And that prototype got me some help from Kubernetes grown-ups to apply that signature PlanetScale operational excellence.

We delayed the launch from Re:Invent 2024 into the spring of 2025 so we could launch it with enormous production workloads and no “beta” qualification.

A few petabytes of storage later, on March 11, 2025, we unveiled this one weird trick to lower your 99th percentile latency to the world. And rather than rehash all of those posts here, I’ll direct you to PlanetScale and several of our customers who brought charts and graphs to back us up.

• PlanetScale Metal: There’s no replacement for displacement
• Announcing PlanetScale Metal by Sam Lambert, CEO of PlanetScale
• Cash App on PlanetScale Metal by Aaron Young from Block
• Evolving Intercom’s database infrastructure: Lessons and progress by Ryan Sherlock and Miles McGuire at Intercom
• 8x faster queries with PlanetScale Metal by Jacob Gillespie at Depot
• The Fastest SQL Database Ever Made by Theo Browne
• Upgrading Query Insights to Metal by Rafer Hazen from PlanetScale

To wrap it up, here’s the graph that prompted Rafer to say “omg” when we moved the first shard of PlanetScale’s Query Insights database to Metal.