Database-as-a-service company PlanetScale Inc. today launched a new version of its database for Kubernetes, the popular container orchestration software.

The beta version of PlanetScaleDB for Kubernetes gives organizations an easy way to run their database alongside their applications in the cloud, while ensuring all data remains within the customer’s network perimeter. The idea is to eliminate complex infrastructure, and provide a software-as-a-service-style experience that removes concerns users may have around backups, durability and high availability.

The new offering is based on PlanetScaleDB, which is a unique Structured Query Language database that can run across multiple cloud platforms at once, helping protect against any loss of service if one cloud provider goes down. PlanetScaleDB owes its cloud-spanning capabilities to the open-source project Vitess, which is one of the primary technologies it’s built upon. Vitess is a database solution for deploying, scaling and managing large clusters of open-source database instances.

PlanetScaleDB for Kubernetes is similarly built atop Vitess, which has become one of the hottest projects hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Aimed at addressing Kubernetes’ storage problems, it’s used by companies such as Slack Technologies Inc., Square Inc. and YouTube to serve millions of queries per second.

PlanetScale is betting that a specialized database service for Kubernetes will be well-received, citing research by Markets and Markets that forecasts the software container market to grow to $4.98 billion by 2023 as applications are increasingly moved to the cloud.

It says COVID-19 is likely to accelerate this trend further, as companies look to deploy even more resilient applications based on cloud-native technologies such as Kubernetes. PlanetScaleDB is being pitched as an option for companies that want to simplify their application infrastructure by keeping their apps and data together.

“Kubernetes has emerged as an operating system for computing resources, either on a company’s own data center or in the public cloud,” said PlanetScale co-founder and Chief Executive Jiten Vaidya. “PlanetScaleDB for Kubernetes enables organizations to leverage Kubernetes for running transactional workloads, with the ease of a managed service.”

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