Scaling hundreds of thousands of database clusters on Kubernetes

This post details how PlanetScale uses Kubernetes and a Vitess Operator to manage a large fleet of database clusters. It explains the challenges of running stateful databases on Kubernetes, contrasting PlanetScale's approach of using the Vitess Operator with StatefulSets for storage management. It also describes their custom orchestration for new database deployments, a specialized backup strategy using dedicated tablets, and multi-AZ provisioning for high availability.