What makes up a PlanetScale database?

The PlanetScale interface is designed to be simple and easy to use. You click a button, and a database cluster spins up. But behind the scenes, there’s a lot happening. It all starts with Vitess and Kubernetes.

Optimized for scale

Vitess allows you to run multiple instances of MySQL across multiple servers and have them appear as a single MySQL instance to your application. It is highly scalable, can automatically rewrite and optimize queries, each cluster has a load balancer, and caching logic is built-in. All of the Vitess components that PlanetScale utilizes can be run within a Kubernetes environment, combining the very best of resilient infrastructures with horizontal scalability.

Low latency and faster data access

On top of that, PlanetScale has it's own built-in edge routing infrastructure across supported cloud providers and regions around the world. When applications connect to databases in PlanetScale, connections (down to the MySQL protocol!) are established at the node closest to them.

Those connections are then proxied over a global network back to your database in its home region, where the actual data lives. This means that the quality of the connections to the database are improved, resulting in lower latency and faster data access for your application.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the power behind PlanetScale databases. If you want to learn more, check out our full post on the topic over on our blog.