PlanetScale branching vs. Amazon Aurora blue/green deployments

This post compares PlanetScale's branching strategy with Amazon Aurora's blue/green deployments for database maintenance. It details how Aurora's blue/green deployments work by creating a clone and using binlog replication for synchronization, highlighting limitations with schema changes and the downtime associated with switchovers. In contrast, PlanetScale's branching creates isolated Vitess clusters for development, uses a 'ghost' table approach for non-blocking schema changes via deploy requests, and performs rolling upgrades on Vitess tablets for instance type adjustments and version updates, minimizing downtime and cost.