Neki – Sharded Postgres (planetscale.com)

243 pointsby simon_weber18 hours ago131 comments

gk1 17 hours ago

Folks, in your launch posts remember to describe what you're launching and what it's for. Ideally in the opening paragraph.

- Intro: Explains problem but not what is Neki or what it's for.

- Why Neki: Explains alternatives and why they suck but not what is Neki or what it's for.

- How does Neki work: Describes the technical components but not what is Neki or what it's for.

- What you get beyond sharding: Explains how to run/deploy but not what is Neki or what it's for.

- What is a platform preview + Try Neki today: 140 words on the definition of "preview" and links to get started... but not what is Neki or what it's for.

Edit: The landing page has 100x more useful information up front -> https://neki.dev/

Edit #2: They've since added a "What is Neki" section. Good reaction time.

dwb 16 hours ago

The landing page which is linked at the start of the second sentence of this page…? I don’t completely disagree with you, but this is mostly hypertext working as intended, is it not?

fastball 15 hours ago

Yeah this meta commentary on HN is very confusing for me. The structure of the article is literally

- short paragraph saying "we launched neki"

- short paragraph saying why neki was needed

- paragraphs about what neki is (with a header)

That seems like a very reasonable structure for a blog post like this one. Not being able to get to the third paragraph of a blog post seems like a "you" problem, not a blog problem.

crooked-v 6 hours ago

The "what is" section didn't exist when they commented.

simonw 9 hours ago

Sadly, in 2026, you should never assume anyone will click a link.

entrope 3 hours ago

Why "sadly"? The person writing a link should provide enough detail for readers to figure out whether they should follow the link. I rolled my eyes the first time I saw this entry on HN because it just said "Neki" and the (generic) target domain name. A two-word description got added, and that makes it interesting instead.

DrammBA 16 hours ago

Folks, your blog post sucks at marketing.

Edit: your marketing site actually has excellent marketing information.

Edit #2: They've since replaced the blog post with a link to the marketing page. Good reaction time.

ahoka an hour ago

I scrolled through the landing page and even the "Get started" page and I have still no idea what is this. Is this a managed db? Something I can run myself? No idea.

Yannik_Sc an hour ago

I love the offer which is running on the "PlanetScale Metal".

They claim to provide unlimited IOPS (I/O operations Per Second).

I would like to get some of these drives myself. Sounds like a technical miracle.

On the other hand claiming such miracles makes me wonder which other aspects in this are are actually a working miracle or rather a mythos/false marketing claim.

Atreiden 16 hours ago

The top concern I've gotten from dev teams when proposing HA distributed postgres (e.g through RDS Aurora global) is that eventual consistency is not suitable for many workloads.

Does Neki solve for this, and if so how? My understanding of CAP theorem is that this basically requires some compromises around availability, but I'm curious as to what that looks like in practice here.

mcpherrinm 16 hours ago

Assuming it works the same way as their MySQL product, Vitess:

The usual way to run it is that you partition your db based on something like a user, so that single user gets a consistent DB, but anything cross-shard may not be.

I know when I worked at Block, Cashapp was using Vitess and getting cross-shard DB writes down and functioning correctly was one of the major blockers to adoption. (though I just did tls management for vitess and didn't write any workloads on top of it, so my impression might be a bit off)

ronfriedhaber 16 hours ago

Therefore, Consistency guarantees are based on implementing application-specific partitioning (correctly)?

mcpherrinm 15 hours ago

Yeah. Vitess does have some options for atomic cross-shard commits using an additional database to track two-phase commits, but that's expensive so you probably want to avoid that. https://vitess.io/docs/25.0/reference/features/distributed-t...

arrowleaf 16 hours ago

Same here, first thing I need to know when considering a distributed system is how consistency is handled. If it's eventual consistency, what is the replication lag like? If it's strong consistency, can their network handle that? What happens when a node goes down?

xyzzy_plugh 15 hours ago

I love how the Planetscale CEO has been shitting on multigres[0], Supabase's equivalent to Neki, and gloating about how superior Neki is, and yet Neki is not even open source!

Sam, it feels like you're just playing games. It's hard to take anything you say or do seriously. Are you going to OSS this thing? Or have you decided to backpedal?

Congrats on the checks notes closed launch, I guess?

0: https://github.com/multigres/multigres

samlambert 15 hours ago

How does open source have anything to do with Neki's ability to scale against a service that doesn't even do sharding.

margalabargala 15 hours ago

They both are characteristics of software that people consider when deciding whether to use it.

Open source being by far the more important of the two, since it means the user is more insulated by terrible corporate decisions thus making it more suitable for long term planning.

samlambert 15 hours ago

have you ever worked for a customer of AWS? If so you have contributed heavily to the destruction of commercial open source.

xyzzy_plugh 15 hours ago

But your customers are, of course, somehow different? What point are you even trying to make?

Commerical open source is fine. It's nobody else's fault if you raised too much to make it work sustainably.

samlambert 15 hours ago

My customers aren't pretending it's a bad thing that Neki isn't open source.

xyzzy_plugh 14 hours ago

You've simply chosen not to listen, considering that they've voiced those concerns to me.

cschmatzler 14 hours ago

A year ago in the initial announcement post you explicitly mentioned open sourcing it.

> When we are ready we will release Neki as an open source project suitable for running the most demanding Postgres workloads.

Has this changed?

dkgs 13 hours ago

Acknowledging the benifits of keeping a commercial product closed source is one thing, claiming open source has no value is another thing.

Sad to see this coming from a company that was itself built on the foundation of an open-source project like Vitess.

samlambert 13 hours ago

who said open source has no value? I worked at GitHub for 6 years i clearly love open source.

We maintain Vitess using our company funds. Why are you going after a small company for defending itself against companies like Amazon but not criticizing the reason we have to do this.

I would love to open source Neki and I have not said we won't.

xyzzy_plugh 13 hours ago

See? You're proving my point. All you do is play games. Are you even capable of engaging without confrontation?

margalabargala 14 hours ago

I have not in fact, no, despite working 12 years as an SWE.

Unlike you, probably, if we're slinging unfounded accusations.

tvink 13 hours ago

I've never known in a shorter time that a CEO is too defensive to be a business partner faster.

therein 12 hours ago

It is the only reason I come to the comments section of PlanetScale posts on HN.

Their CEO always immediately comes in and makes a fool out of himself. He is what you get when you mix narcissism and being a midwit.

fwip 13 hours ago

modeling your public relations strategy after matt mullenweg, I see

Twirrim 12 hours ago

It's very effective, I'm certainly persuaded to never touch their products.

A remarkable own goal given that if they'd literally held their tongue, I'd be at worst indifferent.

karlmush 12 hours ago

Every PlanetScale launch seems to come with a side of beef with the competition. Case in point: https://x.com/samlambert/status/2098069474205470970?s=20

Just launch the product and let it speak for itself. The constant need to take shots at competitors comes across as pretty childish.

vincnetas 5 hours ago

Wow, that thread has bro energy maxed out. Is this normal modern way of communicating for top leaders or i'm getting old?

tpetry 3 hours ago

Sam is always shitting on others. For years he has been screaming how bad PostgreSQL is compared to MySQL. Until getting silent about this topic for a few months and then launching PostgreSQL support. Seems he had to realize than the market for PostgreSQL is too big to ignore.

pm90 2 hours ago

No it isn’t normal, its just this one person. I don’t personally find this language particularly appealing, especially for a serious discussion on technology. But hey, its a free country, they’re a startup and its one way of grabbing the scarcest of resources: attention.

kolanos 12 hours ago

Do they get the same backlash if they went with a source available license similar to MongoDB or Elastic?

fsuts 11 hours ago

Kinda ironic that Planetscale built their company on open source Vitess that google built

And now planetscale have made a Vitess like equivalent for Postgres which they have made proprietary

hiyer 8 hours ago

They have made it proprietary so that providers like AWS can't build their own service with it, thus eating into PS's income.

Google is big enough to survive open-sourcing Vitess, k8s, angular, etc. Planetscale isn't.

samlambert 8 hours ago

correct. AWS do anti-competitive stuff to us all the time we can't make it any easier for them.

figmert 4 hours ago

Google, Azure, and AWS already have their highly available PostgreSQL alternatives.

hanspagel 15 hours ago

I need this for my side project that has zero users, but I wonder if Neki will scale well enough.

ehfeng 15 hours ago

have you tried simultaneously vertically and horizontally scaling?

hanspagel 15 hours ago

My plan is to automatically boot a new Kubernetes cluster for every db query.

I wonder how the performance will be, but I can just rewrite everything in Rust.

Tepix 4 hours ago

Make it serverless.

erulabs 17 hours ago

I love to see this but as a heavy Vitess/MySQL user I do fear the split focus from PlanetScale. Hoping to see continued improvements on the Vitess side as well.

Selfish doubts aside, congrats to Planetscale on the launch!

imjosh-dev 16 hours ago

don't worry, we still give a lot of love to vitess. at the end of the day they are both databases. the beauty of doing both is we can take learnings from each product and apply it to the other.

eile23 5 hours ago

How are cross-shard joins and transactions handled? Are there query patterns that would require application changes despite using the same drivers and ORM?

dvtkrlbs 16 hours ago

Is this going to be open sourced? I thought this was the plan at the start. But ow I am confused.

khy 17 hours ago

Man, I was deep into this blog post before I was able to answer the question "what is Neki?".

imjosh-dev 17 hours ago

https://neki.dev/ is a much more terse overview of neki

1121redblackgo 15 hours ago

Now that's a nice release page.

ahknight 16 hours ago

If I don't know what I'm reading about by the third or fourth phrase, I skip it. Empty language comes from empty minds and I don't have time for that.

kaycebasques 17 hours ago

I am on a 12 Muni right now that is plastered with a Neki ad, and I looked up neki.dev literally 10 mins ago to see what this product is about. Did they time the release of this bus ad with the launch date?

kelp 16 hours ago

Bus ads have been running for a little while now. A few billboards around too.

ripe 16 hours ago

Neki is a sharded Postgres implementation. It introduces one level of indirection between the application and the Postgres shards.

Found this from neki.dev.

fastball 15 hours ago

You can also find that in first section of the linked post (after the intro)...

devy 15 hours ago

How does Neki compare to https://pgdog.dev/?

samlambert 15 hours ago

it works and does sharding

levkk 12 hours ago

Same here! Except:

- PgDog is open source

- It runs anywhere, not just your cloud

- It's built for Postgres, not a MySQL pivot

samlambert 9 hours ago

what does a mysql pivot mean? like literally what do you think we have done here technically that could be considered a mysql pivot?

Tepix 4 hours ago

So apparently the neki router uses many parts of Postgres. But is it open source itself?

Apparently not.

aamederen 16 hours ago

The first question came to my mind was, how would this compare against Citus.

imjosh-dev 16 hours ago

I actually wrote a bit about this on our blog! https://planetscale.com/blog/the-history-of-postgres-shardin...

kamikazechaser 2 hours ago

Not even freeware/shareware?

tjohnell 17 hours ago

A C2 level diagram included in the blog post would be helpful. What are the drawbacks to using Neki aside from the obvious (new software has bugs)?

arrowleaf 16 hours ago

The first thing I want to know when looking at a distributed system is how consistency is handled, ctrl+f for "consis" on both the blog post and neki.dev has zero hits. So I can only assume it will have eventual consistency with a considerable replica lag for real-time systems.

wewewedxfgdf 13 hours ago

Nice work by the marketing department getting two posts on HN front page at same time.

gk1 7 hours ago

It doesn’t take a marketing person to submit a link.

vaibhav2614 17 hours ago

Pretty exciting to see a sharded Postgres product in the market.

The pitch is compelling. I wonder how many teams will be able to operate sharded database setups in production as a result of this.

vira28 16 hours ago

Obviously welcome more tools for Postgres and sharding but it’s a tough hill to climb against the hyper clouds. Best wishes to the team.

samlambert 15 hours ago

The largest database to ever run on Aurora MySQL runs on PlanetScale, and the largest database to ever run on Aurora limitless also runs on PlanetScale.

OrangeDelonge 5 hours ago

What do you mean? Your comment reads like PlanetScale uses Aurora under the hood, you mean PlanetScale can handle bigger DB’s than Aurora?

theanirudh 5 hours ago

He means that they moved from AWS to Planetscale and yes it handles much larger DBs.

tedd4u 14 hours ago

We went as far as we could on GCP before PlanetScale. Spanner is amazing but also amazingly expensive. And CloudSQL, also amazing as long as you don’t need write scaling. PlanetScale (Vitess+MySQL plus their branching / deployment and monitoring tools) is just not a combination offered on GCP. And while I didn’t use Aurora, from talking to and exploring AWS it doesn’t really have this combination either.

samlambert 9 hours ago

It makes me so happy to hear you had a good experience. Thank you for being a customer.

ragall 17 hours ago

I see no mention of foreign keys, or any other constraints, across shards. If, as I suspect, they're not implemented, it would still be useful but at the level of Spanner 10 years ago.

aabhay 17 hours ago

Cross shard transactions are “coming soon”. So, this is just like having multiple postgres clusters.

spongeboi 17 hours ago

Cross shard transactions are supported, but we don't have support for atomic 2pc cross shard transactions, its WIP

ragall 14 hours ago

Are you one of the developers ? If so, you need to add a specific page explaining in detail the guarantees that this gives.

For example: point 08 says "Assign different tables or workloads to different shard groups" and point 02 says "Split hot shards as workloads grow". How do those interact ? Can a single table be split across multiple shards ? If so don't you need 2pc to enforce primary key constraints ?

The intro pages just read as AI slop.

levkk 10 hours ago

Curious to compare your implementation to ours [1] some day (if you guys open source it).

[1]: https://docs.pgdog.dev/features/sharding/2pc/

phoenix24 16 hours ago

is this open-sourced?

manlymuppet 9 hours ago

I think this will become the new standard.

_1tan 14 hours ago

Cool, but we're on MySQL - anything similar available? Percona XtraDB?

IceWreck 14 hours ago

Vitess/Planetscale? Neki is essentially a version of Vitess for Postgres fom the same guys.

kelp 13 hours ago

Many of the engineers who built Neki also worked on Vitess for years. But it's a ground up new implementation designed to specifically target Postgres.

tedd4u 14 hours ago

That is what the “regular” PlanetScale is all about. It uses the Vitess open source project to do write scaling through shading. It is very powerful and customizable and stable. It was built to run YouTube. Former happy user here.

MrDrMcCoy 5 hours ago

MariaDB Galera or Vitess.

dveeden2 3 hours ago

TiDB: Distributed and MySQL compatible

Hasz 16 hours ago

Independent of the product, love the branding design for this page.