Let's Build PlanetScale from Scratch: Infrastructure
The author details the development of 'Homescale,' an open-source project designed to provide database cloning and branching capabilities similar to PlanetScale. The project utilizes a container-like model for database snapshots to enable efficient development workflows.
Why it matters
It demonstrates how infrastructure-level database management tools can be democratized and built by individual developers using modern storage technologies.
I worked for a database tools company many years ago and was lucky enough to build a few database cloning tools before PlanetScale was cool.
Those tools were never destined to be as successful as PlanetScale, but they had their uses.
The idea behind those tools was simple: isolate the storage layer from compute and use the best storage technology for cloning the database files.
This idea came back to me a while ago while I was tweeting about an interview I had with an F1 team that was looking for a Rust dev with hands-on Ceph experience. Mentioning Ceph reminded me of a failed product attempt I was part of, and I jokingly told a friend that I was going to build Homescale, PlanetScale at home.
I am building Homescale at github.com/homescale-dev/homescale .
Homescale creates writable database instances and point-in-time branches from immutable snapshots without copying the full database.
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