Neki

Neki is sharded Postgres by the team behind Vitess. We're building the next generation of database sharding technology, architected from first principles to bring Vitess-level scale and reliability to PostgreSQL workloads.

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Why we're building Neki

Proven expertise at scale

Built by the team that created and maintains Vitess
Operating thousands of production workloads at extreme scale
Deep experience managing sharded clusters for the world's largest companies

Built from first principles

Architected specifically for Postgres, not a fork of Vitess
Leverages PostgreSQL's unique strengths
Engineered around Postgres-specific challenges

Operational knowledge baked in

Designed by engineers who actually operate sharded clusters
Every decision informed by real-world production experience
Built to eliminate operational complexity

Open source foundation

Will be released as an open source project
Suitable for the most demanding Postgres workloads
Built alongside design partners for real-world use cases

What is Neki?

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 by making it possible to scale MySQL horizontally across thousands of servers.

Neki brings this same power to PostgreSQL.

But Neki is not a fork of Vitess. Vitess succeeds by leveraging MySQL's strengths and engineering around its weaknesses. Postgres is a fundamentally different database with its own architecture, replication model, and operational characteristics. To achieve Vitess-level capabilities for Postgres, we're building from scratch—applying everything we've learned from years of operating sharded databases at massive scale.

Built by operators, for operators

The PlanetScale team runs some of the world's largest sharded Vitess clusters. We manage thousands of production workloads and have deep expertise in what it takes to keep distributed databases running reliably at scale.

Neki is being built with this operational knowledge at its core. Every architectural decision is informed by real-world production experience:

Failure handling: We know how sharded systems fail because we've lived through those failures and built systems to prevent and recover from them
Performance optimization: We understand query routing, connection pooling, and distributed transaction patterns because we optimize them daily
Operational simplicity: We've felt the pain of complex operational procedures, so Neki is designed to minimize toil and maximize automation
Scaling patterns: We know which sharding strategies work at scale and which create operational headaches

We're not just building a product. We're building the tool we wish we had when we started scaling Postgres.

The path forward

Neki is currently in active development. We're working closely with design partners who operate Postgres at significant scale to ensure Neki meets the needs of the most demanding production environments.

When Neki is ready and tested in real production workloads, we'll release it as an open source project. Our goal is to make sharded Postgres accessible to everyone, backed by PlanetScale's expertise and support.

Until then, we recommend starting on our Postgres product. You'll be the first in line to get access to Neki when it is available in private preview, and migrating to Neki will be easiest if you're already running on PlanetScale Postgres.

Our Metal nodes can support extremely high throughput and provide incredible performance that you don't get with network-attached storage solutions. We have NVMe drives that can hold up to 120 TB.

Join us

We're building Neki in close collaboration with companies running Postgres at scale. If your organization faces PostgreSQL scaling challenges and you're interested in being part of Neki's development, we'd love to hear from you.

Stay updated: Sign up at neki.dev to receive updates on Neki's progress

Questions? Contact us at neki@planetscale.com