Engineering Insights

Achieving feature rollouts with ultra-low latency and zero impact to conversion

Beyond Menu is a popular food delivery service in the US that connects restaurants and diners. Their Next.js app is deployed on Vercel and serves millions of hungry visitors every month. To scale their development, they decided to adopt feature flags for gradual rollouts, instant rollbacks, A/B testing, trunk-based development and easier collaboration both internally and with beta users. They knew they needed to evaluate feature flags and A/B tests on both the server and the client. And since th

How Google handles JavaScript throughout the indexing process

Understanding how search engines crawl, render, and index web pages is crucial for optimizing sites for search engines. Over the years, as search engines like Google change their processes, it’s tough to keep track of what works and doesn’t—especially with client-side JavaScript. Read more

Google releases Gemma 2 2B, ShieldGemma and Gemma Scope

Memory-efficient Diffusion Transformers with Quanto and Diffusers

Faster backups with sharding

Scaling a database presents many challenges, one of which is backups.When your database is small, backups can be taken quickly and frequently.As your database grows to into the terabytes, backups become more of a challenge.Taking a single backup can take many hours or even days, depending on hardware and network conditions.At PlanetScale, we make backing up huge databases both easy and fast, and this is accomplished with sharding. With a PlanetScale database, you typically don't have to think to

Building data pipelines with Vitess

Vitess is a popular CNCF project that is used to scale some of the largest MySQL installations in the world — by companies like Slack, Square, Shopify, and GitHub. It provides sharding,connection pooling, and many other features that make it easy to scale MySQL horizontally. Vitess and MySQL are ideally suited for use as an Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) system — where the end-user interacts directly with the system and fast response times are essential as they get productand service infor

Serverless Inference with Hugging Face and NVIDIA NIM

Flags as code in Next.js

We recently introduced a new that allows using feature flags, in Next.js and SvelteKit, and works with any feature flag provider—or when using no flag provider at all. It's not meant to be a competitor to other feature flag providers. Instead, it’s a tool that sits between your application and the source of your flags, helping you follow best practices for using feature flags and experiments, keeping your website fast. Flags SDK Follow along below to get started with the Flags SDK, beginning wi