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we support bare metal inside AWS, GCP, and very soon Azure

Sorry, i should have been clearer: bare metal here meaning any other provider like, for instance, Hetzner. We use a local provider. 10x savings when compared to AWS.

That metal does not seem very bare if it requires a coating of AWS/GCP/Azure.

what do you call bare metal in my office?

On-prem.

why?

Neki right now:

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?


Hey, just to clarify: i’m not the person you’re responding to (my comment is gp comment) and i’m not criticising your product and your work. It truly is a great achievement.

However, in general i would not trust a product that is not open source (foss).

I do like what grafana has been doing for example, with licensing options at the two extremes: gpl/lgpl v3 on one side and proprietary hosted saas version on the other.

We run our own grafana/lgtm stack at work, we’re outgrowing it and we’re evaluating the saas offerings.

But then again, not criticising your work and product, you know better than me about it and about your business, just writing down my proverbial two cents.


Comes off a bit rude, especially from the CEO.

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.

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.


> 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 cost $250,000 to do this run but it feels worth it.

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).

  > 512 shards, each with one Postgres primary each on an r8g.16xlarge
  > 480 Neki routers, each on its own 8xlarge instance
  > We sustained 118,538,803 QPS for 16 minutes across 512 shards and 1.22 PiB of data. Our largest recording was 118,747,267.

  Component                      Detail                           Monthly  Hourly  16-min burst
  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Shard compute                  512x r8g.16xlarge                 $1.41M  $1,930          $515
  Router compute                 480x r8g.8xlarge*                  $661K    $905          $241
  Storage (gp3 floor)            1.22 PiB @ $0.08/GB-mo             $102K    $140           $37
  Storage (io2 floor)            1.22 PiB @ $0.125/GB-mo            $160K    $219           $58
  IOPS (io2, light)              5K IOPS/shard, tiered rate         $166K    $228           $61
  IOPS (io2, medium)             20K IOPS/shard, tiered rate        $666K    $912          $243
  IOPS (io2, worst-case)         231,517 IOPS/shard (0% cache)     $4.56M  $6,251        $1,667
  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Total (gp3 floor)                                                $2.17M  $2,975          $793
  Total (io2 floor)                                                $2.23M  $3,054          $814
  Total (io2 + light IOPS)                                         $2.40M  $3,282          $875
  Total (io2 + medium IOPS)                                        $2.90M  $3,966        $1,058
  Total (io2 + worst-case IOPS)                                    $6.79M  $9,305        $2,481

I see the machine sizes some people are allowed to use and I cry. Here I am being asked to downsize our VMs to only use 32 GB RAM.

your calculation does not account for the load generation and cross-az network cost

Sounds more right. Where did $250k come from?

I think Sam is an exec at the company.

Presumably it took more than one attempt, or there's some humanpower in the budget.


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.

We used r8g.16xlarge instances with EBS disks, no nvmes

would love to hear more about the ebs volumes, iops/size/raid configuration

each shard had a 4TiB volume with 65k IOPS and 1,500 mbps of throughput

It felt rude to take so many r8gd instances away from our customers who really love those (and i8g and i8ge).

I did not know men could build such things.

undecided right now

I assume it's already on your radar, but look into fair source: https://fair.io.

thank you!

correct. AWS do anti-competitive stuff to us all the time we can't make it any easier for them.

What a convenient excuse

i have been struggling to hire enough physicists

every metric we have proves otherwise

It makes me so happy to hear you had a good experience. Thank you for being a customer.

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