What makes up a PlanetScale Vitess database?

This post details the core components of a PlanetScale Vitess database, explaining how Vitess and Kubernetes work together. It describes Vitess components like Tablets, vtgate, and vtctld, and how they are deployed as pods within Kubernetes. The post clarifies that each PlanetScale database and branch is an independent Vitess cluster. It also introduces PlanetScale's edge connectivity infrastructure for improved database access, online schema change capabilities leveraging Vitess, database branching and deploy requests with safety checks, schema revert functionality using shadow tables, automated and validated backups, the provision of primary and replica instances across availability zones with automated failover, and built-in query performance monitoring with Insights.