PlanetScale vs. Amazon Aurora

PlanetScale and Amazon Aurora are both MySQL-compatible database platforms that aim to improve scalability, performance, and management of databases. PlanetScale is built on top of open-source Vitess technology, while Amazon Aurora is a cloud-native relational database service developed by AWS. Both support horizontal scaling, but their methods differ. PlanetScale offers connection pooling and load balancing through its edge infrastructure, while Aurora splits reads/writes and uses connection pooling as well. In terms of pricing, PlanetScale tends to be more cost-effective due to its use of commodity-grade instance types optimized for a user's workload. Both platforms automate basic database operations and provide monitoring, logging, and auditing solutions. However, PlanetScale offers built-in auditing and log retention, as well as integrations with popular third-party monitoring tools such as Datadog. For change management, PlanetScale provides a Git-like workflow for change management in combination with CI/CD tooling, while Amazon Aurora does not support online schema changes but can use Aurora Backtrack to restore the database to a point-in-time (PIT) to recover from DDL operations that introduce a breaking change. Overall, PlanetScale is considered by many as a superior platform due to its improved scale and performance, cost-effectiveness, and built-in CI/CD and database change management features.