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Neki is sharded Postgres by PlanetScale

read original get Designing Data-Intensive Applications (Kleppmann) → more articles
Why This Matters

PlanetScale, known for bringing Vitess-style sharding to MySQL, is applying the same playbook to Postgres with Neki: a router, sidecars, and control plane that turn many real Postgres clusters into one horizontally scalable database behind a standard Postgres endpoint. That matters because Postgres has become the default choice for new applications, yet scaling it past a single machine has traditionally meant custom sharding code or a proprietary fork. Neki promises online resharding, coordinated schema changes, and zero-downtime imports without application rewrites.

Key Takeaways
Worth a Look

Designing Data-Intensive Applications (Kleppmann) — If sharded Postgres, resharding, and topology-aware routing sound intriguing, this is the book that explains the underlying ideas — partitioning, replication, and consistency — in plain language. It's the go-to reference for engineers deciding how to scale a database past a single machine.

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Each shard is real Postgres. Neki adds the router, sidecars, and control plane needed to scale Postgres horizontally.

Move data to a new shard layout while the database stays online. Rebalance capacity without application rewrites or maintenance windows.

Split hot shards as workloads grow. Neki creates new target shards, catches them up with replication, and moves traffic through topology changes.

Scale Postgres past the limits of a single machine to hundreds of millions of QPS and petabytes of data.

Define how data maps to shards, shard groups, and shard indexes. Placement is explicit, reviewable, and built for controlled resharding.

Run each shard as a highly available Postgres cluster across availability zones. Failures stay isolated to the smallest possible unit.

Assign different tables or workloads to different shard groups. Scale hot, cold, or isolated data on the hardware profile it needs.

Pool connections inside the sharded database layer. Neki routes with awareness of topology, shard health, and session state.

Run schema changes as coordinated workflows across shards. Neki applies the right method per shard and tracks progress through cutover.

Let the platform track health, promote replicas, and update routing. Applications keep using the same Postgres endpoint.

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