Engineering Insights

The foundations of the Frontend Cloud

Core web app decisions tend to center the backend, due to its complexity and impact over huge swaths of the business. However, frontends have grown far more important and complex in their own right. When not prioritized, the intricate infrastructure around them can quickly spin out of control, dragging teams into untold amounts of tech debt. As becomes more common, developers are turning to the Frontend Cloud to automate away the behind-the-scenes hassles of creating and growing dynamic website

Webhook security: a hands-on guide

We recently released webhooks for PlanetScale. One of the more interesting parts of building a webhooks service is making it secure and protected from abuse. As soon as we started talking about the project internally, engineers throughout PlanetScale started sharing the different ways they have seen webhooks be abused or exploited in the past. These collective experiences gave us a good list of things to worry about while building out our own webhooks service. In this post, we'll go through some

Three surprising benefits of sharding a MySQL database

Organizations often shard their database to scale beyond what simply adding resources to a single server can provide. When you horizontally shard your database, you essentially break the data up and split it across multiple database servers. Hearing this, you might think that adding more servers means adding more maintenance overhead to your staff, and more expenses on your budget, with the tradeoff that your organization can handle more database traffic. While there is definitely some truth to

OpenAI announces leadership transition

How to scale a large codebase

Scaling a codebase is an integral, and inevitable, part of growing a software company. You may have heard many terms thrown around as answers — monoliths, monorepos, micro frontends, module federation, and more. At Vercel, we’ve helped evolve their codebases, and we have an opinion on the optimal way to build software.thousands of large organizations Read more

MySQL replication: Best practices and considerations

MySQL offers a wide array of options to configure replication, but with all of those options, how can you be sure you are doing it right? Replication is the first step to providing a higher level of availability to your MySQL database. A well configured replication architecture can be the difference between your data being highly available, or your MySQL setup becoming a management nightmare. At PlanetScale, we support hundreds of thousands of database clusters, all using replication to provide

Vercel Cron Jobs are now generally available

This changelog entry is historical. Edge Functions are deprecated for new projects. Use with the Node.js runtime and . Use for request-time routing before a response completes.Note:Vercel FunctionsFluid computeRouting Middleware Vercel Cron Jobs let you to run scheduled jobs for things like data backups or archives, triggering updates to third-party APIs, sending email and Slack notifications, or any task you need to run on a schedule. By using a specific syntax called a , you can define the

Node.js 21.2.0 (Current)