Postgres at PlanetScale (Changelog Interviews #684)

[upbeat music] Well, friends, welcome back. Summer is over. The show is back. Some of you just, uh, 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 have 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 the smart 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 Nikki, 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 ChangeLaw.com. Learn more at Fly.io. Okay, let's get into it. [upbeat music] 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, it is just overwhelming. How do you all think about that?

Such a good question. It's the question everyone's asking right now. All of our big customers are, are asking us at the minute like, you know, "If we five 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 the, 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, are the same, but we're just 1,000X-ing the speed of it, and you know, that changes nearly every variable.

Yeah, for sure. Okay. So where, where does Buildkite thrive? What particular type of team or enterprise do you thrive in?

The area that Buildkite has always thrived in is, is like this like fastest moving tech companies of the world. Like, we've been disproportionately successful in that small niche, the kind of Shopify class, Uber class, you know, OpenAI class of, um, folks that have this key problem around iterating really, really fast. And you know, the, the thing about all of those folks is they all have subtly different needs, subtly different problems. And so we've tended, uh, 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, puts our system in this tension where, you know, you've got to spend some time assembling those building blocks, the, 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