PlanetScale

PlanetScale is a commercial managed database company that hosts MySQL-compatible databases built on Vitess and Postgres databases in the cloud. It became known for developer workflows around database branching and online schema changes, so teams can alter a schema without downtime.

For workloads that outgrow a single node, its Vitess product provides sharded MySQL and Neki provides sharded Postgres, adding horizontal scaling, online schema changes, no-downtime upgrades and built-in connection pooling. The vendor emphasizes NVMe drives for high IOPS and offers several deployment options for security and compliance, including bring-your-own-cloud with PlanetScale Managed. Vitess is the open-source scaling system originally developed at YouTube by the company's founders. PlanetScale is a proprietary managed service, with a sandbox, documentation, a migration guide and a pricing section on its site.