Managed Backends Remove Scaling Burden
Lenny Bogdonoff, co-founder and CTO of Milk Video, on the past, present and future of Javascript
The real advantage is not raw speed, it is outsourcing the hardest scaling work to infrastructure specialists. A small team can keep shipping product while services like PlanetScale handle sharding, replicas, failover, and schema changes behind the scenes, which turns database performance from an engineering project into a monthly bill. In Jamstack, that trade is often worth more than lower nominal cloud costs because hiring backend and DevOps talent is slower and riskier than buying managed capacity.
-
On the frontend side, teams generally can scale on Vercel without major technical limits, because CDN delivery, build pipelines, and deploy tooling are standardized. The pain point tends to become seat based pricing and platform costs, not whether pages can stay fast under more traffic.
-
On the backend side, managed databases are selling peace of mind. PlanetScale is built around Vitess, which was created at YouTube to run very large MySQL clusters, and packages replicas, branching, backups, and high availability so developers do not need to assemble and operate those pieces themselves.
-
This is the same buy versus build decision seen in search. A team can run Elasticsearch or Solr itself, or pay Algolia to own uptime, indexing, and relevance tuning. The premium looks expensive on paper, but it removes a whole category of operational work from the product team.
The direction of travel is toward more managed backend primitives, not fewer. As more apps are built by small teams and AI assisted teams, products that hide scaling work, especially around databases, auth, and search, should keep gaining share from self managed cloud setups, even when customers eventually rebalance costs by moving some simpler frontend workloads back onto AWS.