Postgres at PlanetScale (Interview)

**Adam Stacoviak** (0:00)
Well, friends, welcome back. Summer is over. The show is back. Some of you just can't get enough. Let's just say you can't get enough. And I'm here to bring it to you. This week, I'm joined by a good old friend, Sam Lambert, CEO of PlanetScale, one of our first conversations happened back in January of 2022 So we had a lot to cover in this pod. We talk about the new $5 PlanetScale Postgres, the story behind Metal. Spoiler, they are not racking and stacking their own MVMEs. They build on the Hyperscalers bare metal machines. This is more a way. The cursor demo they have where agents optimized a database and shipped it safely through deploy requests. Why you can roll back a 500 terabyte schema change as fast as a one megabyte change and Sam's genuinely unresolved wrestling match over whether to open source Neeky, their new sharded Postgres product. A huge, massive thank you to our friends and our partners over at fly.io. That is the home of changelog.com. Learn more at fly.io.
OK, let's get into it.
Well, friends, I'm here with the CTO of BuildKite, and one of the most challenging problems of modern era software development is continuous integration and continuous delivery. And so, Lachlan Donald, BuildKite CTO, what are you thinking about today's teams, the challenges they face, the speeds at which they're developing new features, new code, is just overwhelming. How do you all think about that?

**Jerod Santo** (1:48)
Such a good question. It's the question everyone's asking right now. All of our big customers are asking us at the minute, like, you know, if we 5 or 10x our throughput this year or 1,000x it, what breaks and when? And, you know, my answer is kind of same as it's been for the past 20 years, which is that the bottleneck is still trying to integrate those code changes in and then deploy them and check they work, and then keep them working as you keep throwing more and more code at it. I think a lot of the fundamentals are the same, but we're just 1,000xing the speed of it. And, you know, that changes nearly every variable.

**Adam Stacoviak** (2:23)
Yeah, for sure. OK, so where where does BuildKite thrive? What particular type of team or enterprise do you thrive in?

**Jerod Santo** (2:32)
The area that BuildKite has always thrived in is like this like fastest moving tech companies of the world. Like, we've been disproportionately successful in that small niche. They're kind of Shopify class, Uber class, you know, OpenAI class of folks that have this key problem around iterating really, really fast. And, you know, the thing about all of those folks is they all have subtly different needs, subtly different problems. And so we've tended historically towards building, like, really well engineered Lego blocks that scale, like, orders of magnitude more than what our nearest competitor does. So, you know, I think that that puts our system in this tension where, you know, you've got to spend some time assembling those building blocks, those Lego blocks to get the thing that you want. But the end result is far and away more performant and scalable, and the experience is better than what you get from something that's off the shelf. So I think we've started from a position of really well engineered Lego blocks, and then are kind of working backwards towards kind of creating the thing that scales down to a startup that starts with one person and ten agents next week.

**Adam Stacoviak** (3:41)
Well, friends, go to buildkite.com. That's buildkite.com. You deserve better CI. Engineer for the frontier we are all facing, trusted by the teams setting the pace. Again, buildkite.com. Once again, buildkite.com.
Friends, I am back with an old friend. It's been several years, about four years, Sam, since you've been in the pod. Sam Lambert, CEO of PlanetScale, one of my most favorite databases that I don't use. I'm so sad, Sam. I am on the list of trying out Metal, because who doesn't love a good MV on me, right?

**Sam Lambert** (4:37)
Oh, yeah. You've got to have that performance, especially with databases. Inside the server, disk, magic.

**Adam Stacoviak** (4:43)
Yeah.
You know, I always felt like, you know, PlanetScale was out of my realm in terms of what I personally needed, because you're just so good. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? What do you think, Sam?

**Sam Lambert** (4:55)
Well, luckily, for folks like yourself, we now have a $5 Planet Postgres option, PlanetScale Postgres. Very accessible, the price of a kind of diet coke in the fine but expensive city of San Francisco. And so, like, very well priced for people that just want to get going and have some simple Postgres, but all the great features of PlanetScale bundled in.