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Neki

What it is

Neki (neki.dev) is PlanetScale's new horizontal- sharding system for Postgres, under active development as of 2025-07-01 and waitlist-only at announcement. It is PlanetScale's stated intention to bring "Vitess' power for Postgres" — without using Vitess.

Why a new system

The canonical sharding story for PlanetScale's MySQL product is Vitess — the MySQL-protocol sharding substrate spun out of YouTube. For Postgres, PlanetScale explicitly rejected Vitess:

Vitess is one of PlanetScale's greatest strengths and has become synonymous with database scaling. Contemporary Vitess is the product of PlanetScale's experience running at extreme scale. We have made explicit sharding accessible to hundreds of thousands of users and it is time to bring this power to Postgres. We will not however be using Vitess to do this.

Vitess' achievements are enabled by leveraging MySQL's strengths and engineering around its weaknesses. To achieve Vitess' power for Postgres we are architecting from first principles. We are well under way with building this new system and will be releasing more information and early access as we progress. As with all PlanetScale products we work with customers at scale to build and validate maturity.

(Source: sources/2025-07-01-planetscale-planetscale-for-postgres.)

Canonical wiki instance of patterns/architect-sharding-from-first-principles-per-engine — PlanetScale's stance that sharding layers are engine- specific by construction and cannot be ported across engines without losing the architectural leverage that made them work in the first place. The MySQL-idiom decisions Vitess leans on — storage-engine-level ROW binary log, MySQL's replication protocol, MySQL-specific transaction isolation semantics, MySQL-specific DDL characteristics — don't translate to Postgres's WAL / logical-replication / MVCC model.

Architecture

Not publicly disclosed at launch. neki.dev is a waitlist page. PlanetScale's commitment: "We will be releasing more information and early access as we progress."

Caveats

  • Waitlist-only. No published architecture, design document, or code.
  • No timeline for public preview / GA.
  • Name origin undisclosed. "Neki" (ねき?) is not etymologically explained in the post.
  • Not part of initial PlanetScale for Postgres private preview. Launch-time PlanetScale for Postgres is single-primary Metal clusters; Neki adds the horizontal sharding layer later.
  • Design decisions inherited from Vitess experience likely to transfer (VTGate-like routing layer, VReplication- like online-resharding, schema-change tooling) but PlanetScale is explicit the Postgres version is from- scratch architecturally.

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