Uploaded June 2025 | Updated September 2026, 8 hours ago

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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.

Database School: databaseschool.com
PlanetScale: planetscale.com
PlanetScale Metal: planetscale.com/blog/announcing-metal

Follow Richard:
Twitter: twitter.com/rcrowley
Website: rcrowley.org

Follow Aaron:
Twitter: twitter.com/aarondfrancis
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/aarondfrancis
Website: 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