174 pointsby simon_weber6 hours ago17 comments
  • xyzzy_plugh4 hours ago
    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?

    0: https://github.com/multigres/multigres

    • karlmusha minute ago
      Every PlanetScale launch seems to come with a side of beef with the competition. Case in point: https://x.com/samlambert/status/2098069474205470970?s=20

      Just launch the product and let it speak for itself. The constant need to take shots at competitors comes across as pretty childish.

    • samlambert4 hours ago
      How does open source have anything to do with Neki's ability to scale against a service that doesn't even do sharding.
      • margalabargala3 hours ago
        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.

        • samlambert3 hours ago
          have you ever worked for a customer of AWS? If so you have contributed heavily to the destruction of commercial open source.
          • tvink2 hours ago
            I've never known in a shorter time that a CEO is too defensive to be a business partner faster.
            • therein40 minutes ago
              It is the only reason I come to the comments section of PlanetScale posts on HN.

              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.

          • margalabargala3 hours ago
            I have not in fact, no, despite working 12 years as an SWE.

            Unlike you, probably, if we're slinging unfounded accusations.

          • xyzzy_plugh3 hours ago
            But your customers are, of course, somehow different? What point are you even trying to make?

            Commerical open source is fine. It's nobody else's fault if you raised too much to make it work sustainably.

            • samlambert3 hours ago
              My customers aren't pretending it's a bad thing that Neki isn't open source.
              • cschmatzler2 hours ago
                A year ago in the initial announcement post you explicitly mentioned open sourcing it.

                > When we are ready we will release Neki as an open source project suitable for running the most demanding Postgres workloads.

                Has this changed?

              • dkgs2 hours ago
                Acknowledging the benifits of keeping a commercial product closed source is one thing, claiming open source has no value is another thing.

                Sad to see this coming from a company that was itself built on the foundation of an open-source project like Vitess.

                • samlambert2 hours ago
                  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.

                  • xyzzy_plughan hour ago
                    See? You're proving my point. All you do is play games. Are you even capable of engaging without confrontation?
              • xyzzy_plugh3 hours ago
                You've simply chosen not to listen, considering that they've voiced those concerns to me.
          • fwip2 hours ago
            modeling your public relations strategy after matt mullenweg, I see
            • Twirrim38 minutes ago
              It's very effective, I'm certainly persuaded to never touch their products.

              A remarkable own goal given that if they'd literally held their tongue, I'd be at worst indifferent.

  • gk16 hours ago
    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.

    • DrammBA4 hours ago
      Folks, your blog post sucks at marketing.

      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.

    • 5 hours ago
      undefined
    • dwb4 hours ago
      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?
      • fastball4 hours ago
        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.

  • parthdesai4 hours ago
    The tech might be amazing, but the CEO comes across as an asshole
    • cwisecarver3 hours ago
      He's actually quite nice over zoom so he just comes off as funny on twitter once you've met him.
      • overfeed2 hours ago
        > 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.

    • samlambert3 hours ago
      I can fully understand why someone would think that.
      • parthdesai3 hours ago
        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.

        (I'm a paying PS customer)

    • tonyhb3 hours ago
      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.

      They build good stuff and care.

      • mbesto2 hours ago
        You can build good stuff, care, and be very opinionated...you can also be all of those things and still be an asshole.
    • tombert4 hours ago
      Genuine question, since I'm a little out of the loop; why do you say that?
      • parthdesai4 hours ago
        • samlambert4 hours ago
          nothing i have said is untrue. a founder of a company leaving to compete out of greed is a bad thing and i am glad to call it out.
          • mbesto3 hours ago
            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.

            • prisonguardan hour ago
              Unless you are at the basketball court where talking smack is a valid winnign strategy
            • omnicognate3 hours ago
              > You can both be an asshole and be right.

              "You're not wrong Walter, you're just an asshole." - The Dude

            • ragallan hour ago
              > You can both be an asshole and be right.

              Only petty people can hold that view.

          • margalabargala3 hours ago
            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.

            No one accused you of dishonesty.

  • hanspagel3 hours ago
    I need this for my side project that has zero users, but I wonder if Neki will scale well enough.
    • ehfeng3 hours ago
      have you tried simultaneously vertically and horizontally scaling?
      • hanspagel3 hours ago
        My plan is to automatically boot a new Kubernetes cluster for every db query.

        I wonder how the performance will be, but I can just rewrite everything in Rust.

  • khy5 hours ago
    Man, I was deep into this blog post before I was able to answer the question "what is Neki?".
    • imjosh-dev5 hours ago
      https://neki.dev/ is a much more terse overview of neki
    • ahknight4 hours ago
      If I don't know what I'm reading about by the third or fourth phrase, I skip it. Empty language comes from empty minds and I don't have time for that.
  • dvtkrlbs4 hours ago
    Is this going to be open sourced? I thought this was the plan at the start. But ow I am confused.
  • kaycebasques5 hours ago
    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?
    • kelp5 hours ago
      Bus ads have been running for a little while now. A few billboards around too.
  • devy3 hours ago
    How does Neki compare to https://pgdog.dev/?
    • samlambert3 hours ago
      it works and does sharding
      • levkk31 minutes ago
        Same here! Except:

        - PgDog is open source

        - It runs anywhere, not just your cloud

        - It's built for Postgres, not a MySQL pivot

  • ripe4 hours ago
    Neki is a sharded Postgres implementation. It introduces one level of indirection between the application and the Postgres shards.

    Found this from neki.dev.

    • fastball4 hours ago
      You can also find that in first section of the linked post (after the intro)...
  • wewewedxfgdfan hour ago
    Nice work by the marketing department getting two posts on HN front page at same time.
  • tjohnell6 hours ago
    A C2 level diagram included in the blog post would be helpful. What are the drawbacks to using Neki aside from the obvious (new software has bugs)?
    • arrowleaf4 hours ago
      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.
  • _1tan3 hours ago
    Cool, but we're on MySQL - anything similar available? Percona XtraDB?
    • tedd4u2 hours ago
      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.
    • IceWreck2 hours ago
      Vitess/Planetscale? Neki is essentially a version of Vitess for Postgres fom the same guys.
      • kelpan hour ago
        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.
      • vt_throwaway10 minutes ago
        [dead]
  • xnx5 hours ago
    What does this compete with? Google Cloud SQL?
    • jbonatakis4 hours ago
      Multigres is the one that comes to mind
      • kelp4 hours ago
        Once they implement sharding...
        • jbonatakis4 hours ago
          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.
          • kelp25 minutes ago
            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.

          • samlambert4 hours ago
            We literally have the counterfactual of the old product and company before he left. We can fully discount Multigres doing anything.
          • uberman1234 hours ago
            Sugu? The guy that "barely worked" and "shipped nothing at PlanetScale" according to Planetscale's CEO?
            • karlmush5 minutes ago
              Anyone who has worked with Sugu knows this simply isn’t true. Sam Lambert is lying.
          • 3 hours ago
            undefined
  • rs_rs_rs_rs_rs5 hours ago
    Will this be open source at some point?
  • behole5 hours ago
    Site design is tight. I like it.
  • karuppiah78903 hours ago
    It's not Open Source Software. So, I'm not even interested. Lol
    • samlambert3 hours ago
      lol are you an amazon customer?
      • overfeedan hour ago
        lol are you an amazon wannabe?
  • arpinum5 hours ago
    [dead]