Introducing Neki

PlanetScale has introduced Neki, a platform-preview service for sharded PostgreSQL designed from its experience operating large sharded MySQL deployments and addressing the limits of scaling a single Postgres machine. Neki distributes PostgreSQL databases across multiple machines while retaining standard Postgres clusters, SQL behavior, extensions, drivers, ORMs, and wire-protocol compatibility. Applications connect through scalable Neki routers that parse, plan, route, and combine distributed queries, while shard groups allow tables and workloads to be independently distributed and configured. Each shard includes a primary and at least two replicas across three availability zones, with sidecars providing managed connection pooling and a control plane coordinating monitoring, failovers, schema changes, upgrades, imports, and resharding. Database topology is configured through JSON definitions of shard keys, hashing, and shard groups, and online workflows aim to avoid maintenance windows. Neki can initially operate as an unsharded primary-and-replica cluster before customers reshard as demand grows, and it includes PlanetScale features such as Insights, schema recommendations, branching, and MCP. The company states that Neki remains under active development during the preview and should not yet be used for production workloads.

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