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
How does open source have anything to do with Neki's ability to scale against a service that doesn't even do sharding.
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.
have you ever worked for a customer of AWS? If so you have contributed heavily to the destruction of commercial open source.
I've never known in a shorter time that a CEO is too defensive to be a business partner faster.
I have not in fact, no, despite working 12 years as an SWE.
Unlike you, probably, if we're slinging unfounded accusations.
modeling your public relations strategy after matt mullenweg, I see
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.
My customers aren't pretending it's a bad thing that Neki isn't open source.
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?
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.
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.
You've simply chosen not to listen, considering that they've voiced those concerns to me.
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.
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.
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 (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.
The tech might be amazing, but the CEO comes across as an asshole
He's actually quite nice over zoom so he just comes off as funny on twitter once you've met him.
> 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.
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.
You can build good stuff, care, and be very opinionated...you can also be all of those things and still be an asshole.
I can fully understand why someone would think that.
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)
Genuine question, since I'm a little out of the loop; why do you say that?
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.
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.
> You can both be an asshole and be right.
Only petty people can hold that view.
> You can both be an asshole and be right.
"You're not wrong Walter, you're just an asshole." - The Dude
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.
I need this for my side project that has zero users, but I wonder if Neki will scale well enough.
have you tried simultaneously vertically and horizontally scaling?
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.
Is this going to be open sourced? I thought this was the plan at the start. But ow I am confused.
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?
Bus ads have been running for a little while now. A few billboards around too.
Man, I was deep into this blog post before I was able to answer the question "what is Neki?".
Now that's a nice release page.
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.
Neki is a sharded Postgres implementation. It introduces one level of indirection between the application and the Postgres shards.
Found this from neki.dev.
You can also find that in first section of the linked post (after the intro)...
Cool, but we're on MySQL - anything similar available? Percona XtraDB?
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.
Vitess/Planetscale?
Neki is essentially a version of Vitess for Postgres fom the same guys.
it works and does sharding
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)?
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.
What does this compete with? Google Cloud SQL?
Multigres is the one that comes to mind
Once they implement sharding...
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.
Sugu? The guy that "barely worked" and "shipped nothing at PlanetScale" according to Planetscale's CEO?
We literally have the counterfactual of the old product and company before he left. We can fully discount Multigres doing anything.
Will this be open source at some point?
It's not Open Source Software. So, I'm not even interested. Lol
lol are you an amazon customer?
Site design is tight. I like it.