Introducing PlanetScale Portals: Read-only regions

This post introduces PlanetScale Portals, a new capability that allows users to create read-only regions for their databases. It explains the benefits of co-locating data with globally distributed applications to reduce read latency, providing an example of latency reduction from ~90ms to ~3ms. It details how to connect to these read-only regions using specific connection strings and provides a comprehensive Ruby on Rails example demonstrating `database.yml` configuration, automatic role switching, and handling replication lag. Pricing details for storage and row reads are also outlined.