Faster & Cheaper on PlanetScale Metal with Sam Lambert

Today, we have Sam Lambert back on the show! Sam is the CEO of PlanetScale, and if you follow him on X, you know he’s one of the sharpest voices in the database space—cutting through the hype with deep experience and a no-nonsense approach.

In this episode, we dive into PlanetScale’s new Metal offering, which has been battle-tested with PlanetScale’s high-scale cloud business partners and is now GA.

Sam also shares why staying profitable is crucial—not just for the business but for the stability and reliability it guarantees for customers. While many cloud infrastructure companies chase the next hype cycle, Sam prefers to keep it boring—delivering rock-solid performance with no surprises

Finally, we close with Sam's thoughts on other happenings in the database space -- Aurora DSQL, Aurora Limitless, MySQL benchmarks, and multi-region strong consistency.

Tune in for a deep dive into databases, cloud infrastructure, and what it takes to build a sustainable, high-performance tech company.

Timestamps

01:34 Start

06:42 PlanetScale Metal

11:15 The problem with separation of storage and compute

15:02 EBS Tax

17:32 How does Vitess handle durability

22:58 Metal recommended for all PlanetScale users?

27:20 The hidden expense of IOPS for cloud databases

37:41 Timeline of creating PlanetScale Metal

41:32 Focus on profitability

47:52 Removal of hobby plan

57:45 Deprecation of PlanetScale Boost

01:00:24 DSQL

01:01:51 Aurora Limitless

01:04:15 AWS as a partner

01:07:00 The spectacle of AWS re:Invent

01:12:22 Benchmarks and benchmarketing

01:15:51 AWS Databases + multi-region strong consistency