Neki is the best way to scale a highly-available Postgres database. It provides sharding, zero-downtime operations, online DDL, replication workflows, and sophisticated cluster management capabilities, all using real Postgres. Neki abstracts all of this capability behind a single connection string that speaks the Postgres wire protocol. It accomplishes this by placing a sophisticated proxy (router) between clients and the Postgres nodes. This router parses, plans, and coordinates all of the Postgres traffic, routing it to the correct nodes in an extremely efficient way. All of these capabilities come with the other PlanetScale features like Insights, anomalies, and schema recommendations. This makes it a perfect solution for anything from a massive database storing hundreds of terabytes across many shards, all the way down to small, unsharded Postgres databases with a handful of gigabytes. You do not have to shard to use Neki. A new database starts as an unsharded cluster. You still get all the benefits of zero-downtime upgrades, cluster management, connection pooling and more. Whether you later shard depends on your traffic, access patterns, and data — see When to shard.
Availability and access
Neki is currently available through the PlanetScale Platform Preview. An organization administrator can select Join the Platform Preview from the organization dashboard or open Organization settings > Platform Preview and accept the preview terms. Neki then appears as a database engine.
From the maintainers of Vitess
Neki is built by PlanetScale, the maintainers of Vitess. Vitess already runs some of the largest services on the internet, including Slack, Square, and Cursor. Neki is not a Vitess port. It is built from scratch to specifically solve the scalability and operational challenges of Postgres.
Need help?
Get help from the PlanetScale Support team, or join our Discord community to see how others are using PlanetScale.