Neki by PlanetScale

Hacker News Top Products

Summary

Neki is a sharded Postgres solution by PlanetScale that enables horizontal scaling to hundreds of millions of QPS and petabytes of data with zero-downtime operations.

No content available
Original Article
View Cached Full Text

Cached at: 09/10/26, 05:16 PM

# Neki | Sharded Postgres by PlanetScale Source: [https://neki.dev/](https://neki.dev/) ## Sharded Postgres is here Now available Neki is sharded Postgres by PlanetScale\. Every shard is real Postgres\. Neki adds the router, sidecars, and control plane to scale it past a single machine, to hundreds of millions of QPS and petabytes of data, without downtime\. ![Neki, the lucky cat](https://neki.dev/neki-cat.svg) \[ NEKI \] Application Shard 01 Shard 02 Shard 03 Shard 04 An application connects to the Neki router, which routes queries to Postgres shards\. A fourth shard is being split online\. Scale Postgres past the limits of a single machine to hundreds of millions of QPS and petabytes of data\. Split hot shards as workloads grow\. Neki creates new target shards, catches them up with replication, and moves traffic through topology changes\. Move data to a new shard layout while the database stays online\. Rebalance capacity without application rewrites or maintenance windows\. Each shard is real Postgres\. Neki adds the router, sidecars, and control plane needed to scale Postgres horizontally\. 05 Let the platform track health, promote replicas, and update routing\. Applications keep using the same Postgres endpoint\. 06 Run schema changes as coordinated workflows across shards\. Neki applies the right method per shard and tracks progress through cutover\. 07 Pool connections inside the sharded database layer\. Neki routes with awareness of topology, shard health, and session state\. 08 Assign different tables or workloads to different shard groups\. Scale hot, cold, or isolated data on the hardware profile it needs\. 09 Run each shard as a highly available Postgres cluster across availability zones\. Failures stay isolated to the smallest possible unit\. 10 Define how data maps to shards, shard groups, and shard indexes\. Placement is explicit, reviewable, and built for controlled resharding\. Write across shards in one transaction\. Neki coordinates commit so the change is atomic: every shard applies it, or none do\. Use explicit workflows for imports, resharding, schema changes, cutovers, and cleanup\. Neki makes distributed Postgres operations repeatable\. Move to new Postgres versions through the same online migration model: create target shard groups, replicate, cut over, and retire the old groups\. Import into Neki while the source database keeps serving traffic\. Copy, replicate, verify, and cut over when the target is ready\. Each Neki shard has its own WAL and logical replication path\. CDC stays compatible with standard Postgres patterns and per\-shard streams\. Start with a single shard and split as you grow\. Bring an existing database over with a zero\-downtime import, or talk to the team about your workload\.

Similar Articles

Neki

Hacker News Top

Neki is sharded Postgres from PlanetScale, designed to scale Postgres databases across multiple machines while maintaining standard Postgres compatibility and built-in online workflows.

Massively Parallel Postgres Backups

Hacker News Top

PlanetScale describes how it performs massively parallel backups for sharded Postgres databases by spinning up per-shard EC2 instances, restoring prior backups from object storage, and replaying WAL, achieving petabyte-scale backup speeds over 50 GB/s.

118M Queries per Second on Neki

Hacker News Top

PlanetScale achieved 118 million queries per second on their Neki platform with linear scalability across 512 shards, demonstrating exceptional performance and throughput in database operations.

Making 768 servers look like 1

Hacker News Top

PlanetScale explains how to scale a relational database from a single server to 768 servers using database sharding, addressing bottlenecks like write limits and resource contention.