PlanetScale for Postgres is a database as a service, launched in July of 2025, composed largely of open source materials. In addition to Postgres itself, we use Patroni to manage replication and failovers between the primary and replicas, PGBouncer to scale connections beyond what Postgres can support out-of-the-box, wal-g for backups and restores, postgres_exporter for monitoring, running everything entirely on Kubernetes.
In this talk, we'll discuss how we approached this project, what factors informed our technology choices, some of the nuances and sharp edges we've encountered because of those choices, and some interesting ways that we've stitched these components together into a cohesive system which provides out-of-the-box replication, high availability, point-in-time restores, and low/zero-downtime upgrades among many other features.
