In 2015, I was able to get to 1 million read/write queries per second on only a couple nodes and tested this with multiple databases, it required (at the time) decent network tuning and node placement inside AWS but it cost me about 10 to 15 dollars per run if I recall correctly, obviously there is the matter of scaling such performance and so I want to recognize the engineering effort gone into this but this is too much money. This reminds of when one of my teams used Hadoop to process only a a few terabytes of offline data and were able to process the WHOLE THING in only a few hours. I did not have the heart or courage to tell them during the demo that this was overkill, but I did write a very simple (and small) piece of code that could extract all the signals from the offline files in mere seconds with careful network planning and storage optimization and invited them for a demo/lunch and learn next week.
This is a mighty impressive feat and congratulations to the team. I hacked around a lot with database design 10 years ago; table sharding with multiple read-replicas on mysql accompanied by application server cache layer for reads, accompanied by elasticsearch and cassandra clusters - to manage a quite large graph of billions of requests per day.
The reason because I am saying all this, is because nowadays funny enough I advise people that a single postgres box is more than enough and to never overcomplicate. Yes, hardware scaled really well in the past 10 years, but also the reality is most apps won't ever in their lifecycle have that type of traffic and usage to begin with.
I am wondering if we will be entering an internet of unhinged agentic system activity where crazy scaling becomes a thing again. Or perhaps with AI the promise of systems that can consume and find meaningful signals on such vasts amounts of data makes storing and retrieving every tiny atom of information a winning strategy (big data v2). Let's see.
I watched an interview that Casey Muratori did with Tyler Cloutier (SpacetimeDB founder and spokesperson) [1]. One of the points that Tyler is that, given modern CPU architecture with cache lines, a distributed database needs to fan out to at least 50-100 nodes to beat the throughput of a cache-optimized, single node database.
It’s cool to see the flip side of that argument. Planet scale is answering the question, “what does it look like when you DO fan out your workload to >100 nodes?”
There’s a place for both technologies. Very cool stuff.
87.3 % served from cache. Does that mean it returned a result existing in the cache because the very same query was executed before? Probably still a relevant result, if you have to process millions of queries every second, it seems not unlikely that you will see a lot of repeated queries. But at that point you are measuring cache performance more than query performance. But unless you run some standardized query benchmark, a single queries per second number is not that informative anyway because query complexity and therefore execution time can span many others of magnitude. Looking up a name by ID and aggregating across a billion rows from seventeen tables joined together are both a single query.
That's roughly 250x more than it would cost to perform this stunt using on-demand Cloud Bigtable, if my math checks out (~1150 nodes @ 85¢/hour for 1h).
I estimated the cluster to achieve this was ~$3-4k per-hour. I am thinking there is a typo on the r8g.16xlarge and they are actually r8gd.16xlarge (notice the d) which comes with directly attached nvme disks.
I'm curious why the test needed so many router hosts:
512 shards, each with one Postgres primary each on an r8g.16xlarge
480 Neki routers, each on its own 8xlarge instance
That's ~250K queries/sec per router which seems lowish for this type of workload? The routers won't be doing very much (parse query, route it to proper shard?).
that's over 13k queries/sec per router core, about 50% of it is spent doing syscalls, the other 50%: parsing, doing grpc, tls, go gc, resolving the shards, waiting for the responses
neki is still in platform preview, this experimentation allowed us to collect profiles at such scale and ship some nice optimizations, more are coming
> The benchmark was very simple. A single-shard point select, one row fetched per-query by primary key. No writes, joins, or cross-shard queries. The workload that each shard receives is isolated, in that there are no single queries that span multiple shards.
I believe multigress is the similarly aged open equivalent from Supabase. Haven't used it myself and don't know what the differences are in usability, but I'm a bit more interested in that since it's open.
I get that PlanetScale has the currently superior product, and I listed the closest thing to it. You're right it's not ready, but in the case that the parent had mentioned of closed-source making it a deal breaker, it's the best alternative.
Neki looks like a good product, and I trust that something coming from the folks behind Vitess is going to be a damn fine offering, but some of us don't love tying our workloads to fully proprietary products. I wouldn't even want to host something like this myself, but knowing there's a path out of the proprietary hosting (which we've seen time and time again is something we should plan for) is critical for a lot of us when choosing solutions as important as our data layer.
If I needed a truly sharded PG at the moment, Neki is probably the best option I could find.
As for the "alternative" argument specifically, it's not on par at the moment, you're right, but that's their goal and they're attempting to fill the same void. In the case of someone who has a requirement their solution be open source, then Neki is flat out of the running too.
I'm rooting for a good Postgres sharding solution to come out. Your team appears to be doing some good work. I would also like to see where both Neki and Multigres are in five years.
Not being rude, I just do not like the work of my company being written off and under appreciated with comments like yours. Saying it's an open source alternative when it is clearly not is incredibly disingenuous.
Anyone can start a project and say it's an alternative until it achieves the same results is not an alternative. They have raised 10x more venture funding than my company, and we have out executed them with hard work. I will absolutely defend that work.
> I just do not like the work of my company being written off and under appreciated with comments like yours
Not sure how I wrote your product off. I spoke about how it wasn't open, which it isn't.
> Anyone can start a project and say it's an alternative until it achieves the same results is not an alternative. They have raised 10x more venture funding than my company, and we have out executed them with hard work. I will absolutely defend that work.
Good on your team. I believe the animosity here is mostly in our differing opinions of the word "alternative".
> This is who you are carrying water for.
I am not "carrying water". I listed another company. I've never used a Supabase product.
All this because I mentioned something that was open and in the same lane as your new product.
How's this: I won't refer to it as an alternative because it isn't up to at feature parity yet. That's fair. I will however say that you've taken multiple angles unrelated to the original core of my first reply's parent that was that Neki is not open source. That is true and many of us will see it as a downside when chosing a product. That isn't bad. That's just a thing that is.
It appears to be under active development, but you're right that sharding doesn't appear implemented. I'm excited to see what they can build out over the next few years.
Someone posted a twitch conversation yesterday about this, I poked around on the page realised there was no open source version and noped out immediately.
I'm sure it's a great product (it seems like planetscale do good engineering and the folks I know who use them seem fine with it) but I don't do vendor lock-in as a service personally, I'll use whatever employer uses because that's the deal but for personal stuff, well this isn't designed for that really, wrong order of magnitude on scaling.
yeah, this is a definitely a "best case" workload for a sharded database. Single row reads on the key used to shard with no hotspots (no shard to shard network traffic at all).
The reason because I am saying all this, is because nowadays funny enough I advise people that a single postgres box is more than enough and to never overcomplicate. Yes, hardware scaled really well in the past 10 years, but also the reality is most apps won't ever in their lifecycle have that type of traffic and usage to begin with.
I am wondering if we will be entering an internet of unhinged agentic system activity where crazy scaling becomes a thing again. Or perhaps with AI the promise of systems that can consume and find meaningful signals on such vasts amounts of data makes storing and retrieving every tiny atom of information a winning strategy (big data v2). Let's see.
It’s cool to see the flip side of that argument. Planet scale is answering the question, “what does it look like when you DO fan out your workload to >100 nodes?”
There’s a place for both technologies. Very cool stuff.
[1] https://youtu.be/ONxwjqFjP3A?is=awlEJwGLxQmRE25i
Neki 1 primary + 2 replicas: ~$5.0M/month (just the AWS bill)
Google Spanner w/ 3 replicas built in: ~$3.85M/month
512 shards, each with one Postgres primary each on an r8g.16xlarge
480 Neki routers, each on its own 8xlarge instance
That's ~250K queries/sec per router which seems lowish for this type of workload? The routers won't be doing very much (parse query, route it to proper shard?).
neki is still in platform preview, this experimentation allowed us to collect profiles at such scale and ship some nice optimizations, more are coming
I mean... What's the point of this "benchmark"?
Multiple live shards: yes
Query routing across shards: yes
Online shard splitting: yes
Zero-downtime resharding: yes
Multiple independent shard groups: yes
Data topology management: yes
HA / automated failover: yes
Multi-AZ: yes
Connection pooling: yes
Online schema changes: yes
Workflow-driven migrations/cutovers: yes
Zero-downtime imports: yes
CDC / logical replication: yes
Online Postgres version upgrade workflows: yes
Cross-shard transactions: coming
Multigres today:
Multiple live shards: no
Query routing across shards: no
Online shard splitting: no
Resharding: no
Multiple shard groups: no
HA / failover: yes
Multi-AZ: yes
Connection pooling: yes
Logical replication/import work: in progress
Distributed migration/resharding workflows: no
How it is an it's an alternative? Do you just say things without validating?
I get that PlanetScale has the currently superior product, and I listed the closest thing to it. You're right it's not ready, but in the case that the parent had mentioned of closed-source making it a deal breaker, it's the best alternative.
Neki looks like a good product, and I trust that something coming from the folks behind Vitess is going to be a damn fine offering, but some of us don't love tying our workloads to fully proprietary products. I wouldn't even want to host something like this myself, but knowing there's a path out of the proprietary hosting (which we've seen time and time again is something we should plan for) is critical for a lot of us when choosing solutions as important as our data layer.
If I needed a truly sharded PG at the moment, Neki is probably the best option I could find.
As for the "alternative" argument specifically, it's not on par at the moment, you're right, but that's their goal and they're attempting to fill the same void. In the case of someone who has a requirement their solution be open source, then Neki is flat out of the running too.
I'm rooting for a good Postgres sharding solution to come out. Your team appears to be doing some good work. I would also like to see where both Neki and Multigres are in five years.
Anyone can start a project and say it's an alternative until it achieves the same results is not an alternative. They have raised 10x more venture funding than my company, and we have out executed them with hard work. I will absolutely defend that work.
Supabase hire companies to write fake AI slop to slander competitors. https://dev.to/sivarampg/how-a-neutral-supabase-vs-convex-co... They also claim ownership over projects they dont contribute to https://x.com/jrdntgn/status/2022003873171620160 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45321794 (they have no vitess maintainers on staff now and they did not then either)
This is who you are carrying water for.
Not sure how I wrote your product off. I spoke about how it wasn't open, which it isn't.
> Anyone can start a project and say it's an alternative until it achieves the same results is not an alternative. They have raised 10x more venture funding than my company, and we have out executed them with hard work. I will absolutely defend that work.
Good on your team. I believe the animosity here is mostly in our differing opinions of the word "alternative".
> This is who you are carrying water for.
I am not "carrying water". I listed another company. I've never used a Supabase product.
All this because I mentioned something that was open and in the same lane as your new product.
How's this: I won't refer to it as an alternative because it isn't up to at feature parity yet. That's fair. I will however say that you've taken multiple angles unrelated to the original core of my first reply's parent that was that Neki is not open source. That is true and many of us will see it as a downside when chosing a product. That isn't bad. That's just a thing that is.
I'm sure it's a great product (it seems like planetscale do good engineering and the folks I know who use them seem fine with it) but I don't do vendor lock-in as a service personally, I'll use whatever employer uses because that's the deal but for personal stuff, well this isn't designed for that really, wrong order of magnitude on scaling.