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Posted by simon_weber 18 hours ago

Neki – Sharded Postgres(planetscale.com)
243 points | 131 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.

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 1 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.
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 5 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.
Yannik_Sc 1 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 15 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?
harshitgangal 16 hours ago||
[dead]
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

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.
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.
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.

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.

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 14 hours ago||
My customers aren't pretending it's a bad thing that Neki isn't open source.
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?
xyzzy_plugh 14 hours ago|||
You've simply chosen not to listen, considering that they've voiced those concerns to me.
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.

kolanos 11 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.
vt_throwaway 13 hours ago||
[dead]
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.
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