Move Fast and Don't Break Things: Scaling Databases for the AI Era — PlanetScale

This talk extends the understanding of distributed systems and database scaling for AI workloads by detailing how PlanetScale's architecture addresses the challenges posed by AI agents. It elaborates on principles of isolation, redundancy, sharding, back pressure, and decoupling. Crucially, it introduces novel agentic capabilities for infrastructure management: agents designing Vitess sharding schemes from VSchema JSON, Traffic Control for resource budgeting to gracefully handle traffic surges, and database branching with deploy requests and one-click reverts for safe schema changes. The core thesis is that good developer experience primitives directly translate to effective AI agent infrastructure.