I've tried Aurora and Firebase. I think PlanetScale wins on 2 areas at 2 different scales: branching when you're small, and connections when you're large.
With branching it's a feature where every dev can run a command and get their own database version to mess with. They can submit a pull request and as the tech lead I can check it and publish it to prod. Or integrate it with our CI.
On connections, it is interesting how serverless architectures totally flip the model. My node servers used to make a few connections to Postgres while serving thousands of users. Now, each NextJS instance makes its own connection and I might have thousands of database connections for thousands of users. PlanetScale is the only one I know of with effectively no limit on the number of connections. I think Aurora tops out at 16,000.
Does the branching system have an anonymization layer? At pretty much every company that is beyond "tiny startup with < 10 employees" you really don't want to give every developer read access to all customer data.
With branching it's a feature where every dev can run a command and get their own database version to mess with. They can submit a pull request and as the tech lead I can check it and publish it to prod. Or integrate it with our CI.
On connections, it is interesting how serverless architectures totally flip the model. My node servers used to make a few connections to Postgres while serving thousands of users. Now, each NextJS instance makes its own connection and I might have thousands of database connections for thousands of users. PlanetScale is the only one I know of with effectively no limit on the number of connections. I think Aurora tops out at 16,000.