Sharded PlanetScale Postgres is currently in development. This page will be updated as Neki becomes available. Check back regularly or join the waitlist to stay informed.
Introducing Neki
Neki is sharded Postgres by the team that operates some of the largest sharded Vitess clusters in the world. We’re building Neki in close collaboration with design partners who already operate Postgres at significant scale. Neki is architected from first principles to bring Vitess-level scale and reliability to Postgres workloads. Vitess transformed MySQL sharding from an operational nightmare into an accessible, proven technology. It powers some of the largest sites on the internet: Slack, GitHub, Square, and hundreds more. Neki is being built from first principles to bring this same power to Postgres.Read the announcement
Learn why we’re building Neki and what it means for Postgres scaling.
Proven expertise at scale
Built by the team that has operated some of the world’s largest Vitess deployments, managing thousands of production workloads at extreme scale.
Built from first principles
Architected specifically for Postgres, not a fork of Vitess. Engineered around Postgres’s unique strengths and challenges.
Operational knowledge baked in
Designed by engineers who actually operate sharded clusters. Every decision informed by real-world production experience.
Why Sharding Matters
While a well-tuned single Postgres instance can scale further than many expect, there are scenarios where horizontal sharding becomes the right choice. Sharding distributes your data across multiple database instances, allowing you to:- Scale beyond single-instance limits — Handle multi-TB datasets and hundreds of thousands of queries per second
- Improve write performance — Distribute write load across multiple primary instances
- Reduce single points of failure — Isolate failures to individual shards rather than your entire dataset
- Improve tenant isolation — Isolate large or “noisy” customers so their workloads cannot impact others in a shared cluster
You Might not Need Sharding
Before pursuing horizontal sharding, it’s worth exploring whether your current performance challenges can be solved through optimization. We’ve helped many teams migrate to PlanetScale Postgres, dramatically reduce database load, and improve performance without the complexity of sharding. Query Insights can identify slow queries, missing indexes, and inefficient query patterns that may be causing bottlenecks. Combined with schema recommendations, you can often achieve significant performance gains through targeted optimizations. Our Metal nodes deliver exceptional raw performance with NVMe storage that handles throughput and latency far better than traditional cloud storage. Many workloads that appear to need sharding are actually hitting I/O limits that Metal eliminates entirely. For many workloads, moving to PlanetScale Postgres on Metal and fixing a few expensive queries offers years of headroom before sharding becomes necessary. For teams currently facing Postgres scaling challenges, we recommend starting with these optimizations before considering sharding.Stay Updated
As Neki progresses from development to private preview to general availability, we’ll update this page with new information. We encourage you to check back regularly for updates:Join the waitlist
Sign up at neki.dev to receive updates on Neki’s progress and get early access.
Read the PlanetScale blog
Follow our blog for announcements, technical deep-dives, and product updates.
Contact the Neki team
Get in touch if you have questions or are interested in becoming a design partner.
Learn about Neki
Visit the Neki product page for more details on what we’re building.
Related Resources
Neki product page
Learn more about Neki and why we’re building it.
Postgres vs Vitess
Compare PlanetScale’s database products to choose the best fit.
What is database sharding?
Learn the fundamentals of database sharding.
Vitess sharding docs
Explore how sharding works in Vitess for MySQL workloads.