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.
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?
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.
Perhaps he's quite nice over zoom, but since very few of us are going to meet him in that context, the rest of us are left to judge him by what he posts. And as they say, you never get a second chance to make a first impression.
Based on what I've read so far, with his shit-talking the competition, he seems like... a bit of an asshole.
> he just comes off as funny on twitter once you've met him.
Never heard of the guy before today, but his dickish, edge-lord aura (on X and in this thread) makes me not want to meet him. If I had to choose between buying from him, or some other random dude, I'll hear out the random dude first.
Sam is not an asshole. His twitter is great, he's definitely opinionated, and if you haven't had the luck of meeting him you might misread his tone as grumpy. It's not. It's sarcastic/dry humour and honest.
There's obviously more to the story than outsiders are aware, but personally it just leaves a bit of sour taste in my mouth when the tech and blog posts you guys put out are amazing.
Did anyone say you said anything untruthful? No, they just called you an asshole. You can both be an asshole and be right.
PS - Just some advice that I learned in sales 101 early in my career...focusing on shit talking the competition generally isn't a strategy that works well.
In case you were unaware, if someone's defense against being called an asshole is to say "well nothing I said was false" they're almost certainly an asshole.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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)
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?
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!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yet. But it’s built by the guy who created Vitess and cofounded PlanetScale, so while it doesn’t have sharding implemented at the moment I think it would be foolish to discount it. Plus it’s open source.
The PlanetScale team spent years improving Vitess with lessons learned from many different high scale customer workloads. We continue to invest in and improve Vitess. It's a substantial and growing part of our business.
Vitess today is not the Vitess of 2021. About 70% of the current codebase was written in the last five years, based on lessons we learned running it at scale.
Neki is built for Postgres from the ground up, by the engineers who did that work.
On the Multigres comparison, I'll admit we get a bit salty, mostly because "Vitess for Postgres" invites the comparison. But to date there's no public evidence of a working sharding implementation in Multigres. Their sharding design doc landed this week, and it lists cross-shard query planning and resharding execution as explicitly out of scope.
Neki does sharding today, including online resharding that switches traffic without a maintenance window. It isn't open source, but you can spin up a cluster and try it yourself.
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.
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 ?
- 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.
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.
- 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.
Based on what I've read so far, with his shit-talking the competition, he seems like... a bit of an asshole.
Never heard of the guy before today, but his dickish, edge-lord aura (on X and in this thread) makes me not want to meet him. If I had to choose between buying from him, or some other random dude, I'll hear out the random dude first.
They build good stuff and care.
(I'm a paying PS customer)
https://x.com/samlambert/status/2098075451373834681?s=20
PS - Just some advice that I learned in sales 101 early in my career...focusing on shit talking the competition generally isn't a strategy that works well.
"You're not wrong Walter, you're just an asshole." - The Dude
Only petty people can hold that view.
No one accused you of dishonesty.
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
Just launch the product and let it speak for itself. The constant need to take shots at competitors comes across as pretty childish.
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.
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.
Unlike you, probably, if we're slinging unfounded accusations.
Commerical open source is fine. It's nobody else's fault if you raised too much to make it work sustainably.
> When we are ready we will release Neki as an open source project suitable for running the most demanding Postgres workloads.
Has this changed?
Sad to see this coming from a company that was itself built on the foundation of an open-source project like Vitess.
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.
A remarkable own goal given that if they'd literally held their tongue, I'd be at worst indifferent.
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.
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)
I wonder how the performance will be, but I can just rewrite everything in Rust.
And now planet scale have made a Vitess like equivalent for Postgres which they have made proprietary
Selfish doubts aside, congrats to Planetscale on the launch!
- PgDog is open source
- It runs anywhere, not just your cloud
- It's built for Postgres, not a MySQL pivot
Found this from neki.dev.
The pitch is compelling. I wonder how many teams will be able to operate sharded database setups in production as a result of this.
Vitess today is not the Vitess of 2021. About 70% of the current codebase was written in the last five years, based on lessons we learned running it at scale.
Neki is built for Postgres from the ground up, by the engineers who did that work.
On the Multigres comparison, I'll admit we get a bit salty, mostly because "Vitess for Postgres" invites the comparison. But to date there's no public evidence of a working sharding implementation in Multigres. Their sharding design doc landed this week, and it lists cross-shard query planning and resharding execution as explicitly out of scope.
Neki does sharding today, including online resharding that switches traffic without a maintenance window. It isn't open source, but you can spin up a cluster and try it yourself.
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.
I am looking for interdimensional and interuniversal scale. Which of you trust fund babies has a startup which is working on this problem?