PlanetScale has announced the general availability of its new "Metal" class of nodes, which offer improved performance and cost savings for hosting relational databases on AWS and GCP. Metal instances are powered by locally-attached NVMe SSD drives, providing unlimited I/O on every cluster type, with some customers reporting a 65% drop in p99 query latency and 53% cost savings compared to Amazon Aurora. The new feature has been available in production for three months, serving over 5 trillion queries across 5 petabytes of storage. Customers such as Block, Intercom, Depot, and others have reported significant improvements in performance and cost efficiency on Metal.