PlanetScale Launches Neki, a Sharded Postgres Database, in Platform Preview
PlanetScale's from-scratch sharded Postgres engine, first announced in 2025, is now open for platform preview with routers, shard groups, and a control plane.
Overview
PlanetScale has moved Neki, its sharded Postgres database engine, into platform preview, according to PlanetScale’s announcement. The company describes Neki as software that “lets you scale a Postgres database across many machines while keeping real Postgres on every shard,” according to PlanetScale.
What We Know
Neki was first unveiled in August 2025, when PlanetScale wrote, “Today, we are announcing Neki — sharded Postgres by the team behind Vitess,” according to PlanetScale’s original announcement. That post was authored by nine PlanetScale engineers, including Andres Taylor, Dirkjan Bussink, Harshit Gangal, Nick Van Wiggeren, Noble Mittal, Rohit Nayak, Roman Sodermans, Shlomi Noach, and Sam Lambert, according to PlanetScale. Vitess is PlanetScale’s existing MySQL-sharding system, and according to PlanetScale’s documentation, “Vitess already runs some of the largest services on the internet, including Slack, Square, and Cursor” — a track record tied to Vitess, not to Neki itself, which the documentation says “is not a Vitess port” and instead “is built from scratch to specifically solve the scalability and operational challenges of Postgres.”
Over a year later, the platform preview announced this week describes a system built around four components. Applications connect to a Neki router that “speaks the Postgres wire protocol so your existing drivers and ORMs keep working with a single connection string,” and that includes “a full Postgres query parser, a distributed query planner, query buffering and more,” according to PlanetScale. Each shard, meanwhile, is “a full Postgres cluster with one primary and at least two replicas across 3 availability zones,” and PlanetScale says: “There is no custom storage engine, so extensions, SQL support, and performance behave the way Postgres does,” according to PlanetScale.
Connection pooling is handled by “sidecars” that run alongside every Postgres instance, which PlanetScale says makes connection handling “meaningfully better than just sticking PgBouncer in front of a database” because Neki “controls both ends of the connection,” according to PlanetScale. A control plane “tracks the health of every node, runs planned switchovers and unplanned failovers, and coordinates the workflows that reshard data, apply schema changes, and perform version upgrades,” and a JSON-based “data topology” maps logical tables onto physical shards, according to PlanetScale. Operations that would normally require a maintenance window — schema changes, version upgrades, failovers, imports, and resharding — instead run as built-in workflows that “provision new target nodes, catch them up with replication, switch traffic with a __neki metafunction, and retire the old nodes,” according to PlanetScale.
Sharding is also optional at launch: “You do not have to shard to use Neki. A new database starts as an unsharded cluster,” according to PlanetScale’s documentation. Resharding later “is a workflow you run against the cluster you already have,” according to PlanetScale’s blog post. Neki’s dedicated product site lists capacity claims of “100M+ queries per second” and “PB+ of data per database,” alongside a “0 downtime resharding” claim, according to Neki’s product page.
What We Don’t Know
Cross-shard transactions are not yet supported: Neki’s own feature list marks the capability “Coming soon,” according to Neki’s product page. PlanetScale has not published independent benchmark data verifying its stated throughput and storage-capacity figures, and the company is explicit that the product is not ready for production use. Its documentation states that platform preview features “are ‘Beta Features’ under the PlanetScale Terms of Service” and are “not covered by any service level agreement,” according to PlanetScale’s documentation, while the announcement adds plainly: “You should not run production workloads on Neki during the platform preview.” It continues: “The product is still changing, and some of those changes will be breaking,” according to PlanetScale.
Access
Organization administrators can join the platform preview from the organization dashboard or through organization settings, after which “Neki then appears as a database engine,” according to PlanetScale’s documentation.