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/
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?
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
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.
Why "sadly"? The person writing a link should provide enough detail for readers to figure out whether they should follow the link. I rolled my eyes the first time I saw this entry on HN because it just said "Neki" and the (generic) target domain name. A two-word description got added, and that makes it interesting instead.
It's sad because I think links are the best thing about the web, and it's increasingly clear to me that many internet users either misunderstand or actively avoid them.
Why do people post screenshots of an article on social media instead of linking to it?
Sometimes ignorance, but often because the web is such a hostile experience these days - paywalls and subscribe banners and cookie warnings and slow pages.
I scrolled through the landing page and even the "Get started" page and I have still no idea what is this. Is this a managed db? Something I can run myself? No idea.
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.
I am on a 12 Muni right now that is plastered with a Neki ad, and I looked up neki.dev luterally 10 mins ago to see what this product is about. Did they time the release of this bus ad with the launch date?
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.
Never heard of the guy before today, but his dickish 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.
Oh no, what am I ever going to do to to avoid giving my custom to someone who has allegedly cornered the market on - checks notes - a db proxy? Give me a break.
Sure, I don't doubt your ability to do so yourself. I just question your ability to trust some random unknown figure with your data if you have enough scale. That's quite different, actually.
TBF, I hadn't heard of the guy before this thread either, but I don't hang out in the unexpected-scaling-demand-with-no-infra-team circles, which appears to he the target market.
Perhaps he's quite nice over zoom, but since very few of us are going to meet him in that context, the rest of us are left to judge him by what he posts. And as they say, you never get a second chance to make a first impression.
Based on what I've read so far, with his shit-talking the competition, he seems like... a bit of an asshole.
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.
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?
Sam is always shitting on others. For years he has been screaming how bad PostgreSQL is compared to MySQL. Until getting silent about this topic for a few months and then launching PostgreSQL support. Seems he had to realize than the market for PostgreSQL is too big to ignore.
No it isn’t normal, its just this one person. I don’t personally find this language particularly appealing, especially for a serious discussion on technology. But hey, its a free country, they’re a startup and its one way of grabbing the scarcest of resources: attention.
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.
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.
How are cross-shard joins and transactions handled? Are there query patterns that would require application changes despite using the same drivers and ORM?
cross shard joins break down into single shard selects, and are joined in the routers. There are some query patterns that are currently unsupported, but we are working on adding support for them. The biggest thing to keep in mind when running on a sharded database of any kind is decreasing the number of cross shard queries.
I love the offer which is running on the "PlanetScale Metal".
They claim to provide unlimited IOPS (I/O operations Per Second).
I would like to get some of these drives myself. Sounds like a technical miracle.
On the other hand claiming such miracles makes me wonder which other aspects in this are are actually a working miracle or rather a mythos/false marketing claim.
92 comments
[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 21.2 ms ] thread- 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/
- short paragraph saying "we launched neki"
- short paragraph saying why neki was needed
- paragraphs about what neki is
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.
Why do people post screenshots of an article on social media instead of linking to it?
Sometimes ignorance, but often because the web is such a hostile experience these days - paywalls and subscribe banners and cookie warnings and slow pages.
That's sad.
Edit: your marketing site actually has excellent marketing information.
Found this from neki.dev.
(I'm a paying PS customer)
If you have such luxuries, I bet you don't have enough scale to be really profitable for him.
Based on what I've read so far, with his shit-talking the competition, he seems like... a bit of an asshole.
They build good stuff and care.
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
Just launch the product and let it speak for itself. The constant need to take shots at competitors comes across as pretty childish.
And now planet scale have made a Vitess like equivalent for Postgres which they have made proprietary
Google is big enough to survive open-sourcing Vitess, k8s, angular, etc. Planetscale isn't.
That Youtube built. I know at the time Youtube was already part of Google but I don't think of Vitess as a Google Stack.
Apparently not.
However we have a whole team working to improve Postgres and we always prefer to contribute those efforts to the Postgres community.
They claim to provide unlimited IOPS (I/O operations Per Second).
I would like to get some of these drives myself. Sounds like a technical miracle.
On the other hand claiming such miracles makes me wonder which other aspects in this are are actually a working miracle or rather a mythos/false marketing claim.
I think this is marketroid for “we don’t limit them” not a statement about physics