PlanetScale Announces Database Service For Hybrid Cloud Environments

Database-as-a-Service provider PlanetScale Inc. recently announced a new version of its product based on the Kubernetes container management open-source software. The database will also be based on Vitess open source software that enables it to cluster MySQL supported databases. The company said the product will now be available in beta on the various cloud across multiple regions.

Jiten Vaidya (Co-founder and CEO at PlanetScale) said, “With the new release of PlanetScaleDB, we’re enabling businesses to liberate their data with a cross-cloud database, making it effortless to switch from one cloud to another and overcome the challenges and costs associated with cloud vendor lock-in.” 

PlanetScaleDB is powered with cloud-spanning capabilities, all thanks to open-source project Vitess. It is one of the fundamental technologies which PlanetScaleDB is based upon. You must be familiar with what Vitess is actually; if not, it is a database solution for deploying, scaling, and managing large clusters of open-source database instances.

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Vitess currently supports MySQL, which is another critical aspect of PlanetScale’s database. Vitess has garnered colossal attention while solving Kubernetes’ storage problems. These capabilities were solidified when companies like Slack Technologies Inc., Square Inc., and YouTube started using it. Vitess solves a big problem for databases running using containers managed through Kubernetes. In this case, the longevity of the pods that host them cannot be taken for granted. 

PlanetScale made the latest iteration of PlanetScaleDB initially available on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), which will be followed by offering support for Microsoft Azure.

Introducing PlanetScaleDB

PlanetScaleDB enables the users to run the replicas of one database across multiple regions within a cloud provider to create database clusters as a proactive action for disaster recovery. This holds great significance when there is a scenario of a disaster. In this scenario, IT teams can set up one master database that they use to write data. Meanwhile, a replica on a different cloud can quickly become the new master database in the event of a disaster.

Boon for Organization with No Hybrid Strategy

The majority of IT organizations yet to come up with a sound hybrid cloud computing strategy. Such organizations are leveraging multiple cloud as per their use case. Open-source databases such as MySQL combined with Kubernetes defines the possibility of easily migrating data in and out of the different cloud as the situation requires. 

There is another reason that it is a boon. Most of the IT teams jump on the cloud services since the control over cloud environments is secure, and they start experimenting, which is right by the way. But when the teams later realize that the cost is what they can’t control or the services are expensive offered by a particular cloud provider. This is where every team starts brainstorming about migrating their data. 

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The migration of data naturally comes with too many tasks involved in moving data. The workloads are also deeply entwined with proprietary APIs (application programming interfaces), which becomes another challenge to migrate data from one cloud to another. 

PlanetScaleDB, besides enabling data migration support across multiple regions, also provides an impeccably easy way to migrate stateful applications; or those applications which save client data from one session to the next; to the Kubernetes platform. 

There is a long way to go 

There is no doubt that most of the IT environments going forward will always be hybrid by default, but this undoubtedly will take a long time. There may be a lot of enthusiasm for Kubernetes, but most of the workloads still run in on-premise environments.

Sooner the IT organizations realize that they need to make a transition, sooner they would be able to figure out the ways to lower IT costs. PlanetScale is developing products dedicated to achieving the core capabilities of hybrid clouds, which offer many instances of MySQL relational databases running on Kubernetes clusters. 

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