At PlanetScale, we're aiming to build a database that developers love without compromising on features required for scalable applications. We've chosen Vitess as our database engine, which has been powering large-scale production systems for several years due to its enterprise-grade scalability and flexibility. Vitess provides an abstraction over MySQL with added functionality such as automated failure detection and recovery, safety features like row limits and query consolidation, and the ability to split data into multiple shards. While Vitess offers many benefits, it also comes with operational complexity and a steep learning curve. To address this, PlanetScale is designed around ease of adoption and use, providing a seamless onboarding experience and making schema changes fast and easy through its database branching and Deploy Requests features.