The architecture of Neki
Neki is PlanetScale’s sharding layer for vanilla PostgreSQL that presents a single Postgres endpoint while routing queries across a fleet of Postgres instances. It does this with a set of tightly‑coupled components—Router, Sidecar, PostgresManager, Admin, Operator, and etcd‑backed Data Topology—each handling a specific piece of the scaling, failover, and query‑planning puzzle.


