Making 768 servers look like 1

(planetscale.com)

77 points | by hisamafahri 5 hours ago

5 comments

  • drdexebtjl 4 hours ago
    What about sequences? The example shows an auto-incrementing user ID. How’s that possible without contention between all shards? Is the proxy responsible for sequences?

    What about foreign keys? Do they all have to live on the same shard? How do you do distributed transactions?

    On cross-shard reads: how do you do sorting? And cross-shard joins?

    I’d love to be proven wrong, but I suspect the 768 servers look like 1 only on the very surface, and you’ll get wildly different characteristics from cross-shard and single-shard queries.

    I personally would prefer if they _didn’t_ look like 1 if they can’t behave like 1.

    • vkazanov 1 hour ago
      Of course 768 servers NEVER behave as 1. This is physically impossible.

      Global services using relational dbs typically severely restrict queries that run against the cluster. So no joins, no intervals, no grouping, etc.

      Transactional queries are usually limited to something like "get a single record, preferably from cache". For many typical web services this can go VERY FAR. Only a handful of global services needs more than a few dozen database servers and a caching cluster. In fact, i have seen major businesses running off a pair of very big postgres instances.

      Analytical stuff is extracted into dedicated storages optimized for throughput, like Snowflake or Redshift or BigQuery.

    • random3 2 hours ago
      A 767 servers KV store should be enough for everyone
  • zinodaur 3 hours ago
    Sibling post has author answering questions in comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48925420
  • alightsoul 4 hours ago
    Load balancers, microservices and horizontal scaling?
  • jdw64 4 hours ago
    Looks like the GIF is fully built out in code. It's really nice to look at, well made, and easy to understand too. I wonder what program or code they used. I'd love to know.

    p.sI thought it was a GIF, but it's an iframe. That was a nice little surprise.

    • gurjeet 4 hours ago
      Specifically, it's an JS-controlled/animated SVG embedded in an iframe.
      • jdw64 4 hours ago
        Yeah, I'm looking at it in developer mode. It's using a GSAP timeline approach to update SVG properties. I'm curious how they handle security and caching for something like this. It looks like they're using Tailwind, at least. but this approach is really clean and nice.

        It really feels like the best way to learn is by studying other people's code.

        • stavros 2 hours ago
          What kind of security and caching concerns do they need to handle to animate an SVG?
  • aarvin_roshin 4 hours ago