Antfly: Distributed, Multimodal Search and Memory and Graphs in Go
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Hey HN, I’m excited to share Antfly: a distributed document database and search engine written in Go that combines full-text, vector, and graph search. Use it for distributed multimodal search and memory, or for local dev and small deployments.I built this to give developers a single-binary deployment with native ML inference (via a built-in service called Termite), meaning you don't need external API calls for vector search unless you want to use them.Some things that might interest this crowd:Capabilities: Multimodal indexing (images, audio, video), MongoDB-style in-place updates, and streaming RAG.Distributed Systems: Multi-Raft setup built on etcd's library, backed by Pebble (CockroachDB's storage engine). Metadata and data shards get their own Raft groups.Single Binary: antfly swarm gives you a single-process deployment with everything running. Good for local dev and small deployments. Scale out by adding nodes when you need to.Ecosystem: Ships with a Kubernetes operator and an MCP server for LLM tool use.Native ML inference: Antfly ships with Termite. Think of it like a built-in Ollama for non-generative models too (embeddings, reranking, chunking, text generation). No external API calls needed, but also supports them (OpenAI, Ollama, Bedrock, Gemini, etc.)License: I went with Elastic License v2, not an OSI-approved license. I know that's a topic with strong feelings here. The practical upshot: you can use it, modify it, self-host it, build products on top of it, you just can't offer Antfly itself as a managed service. Felt like the right tradeoff for sustainability while still making the source available.Happy to answer questions about the architecture, the Raft implementation, or anything else. Feedback welcome!
HN · launched Mar 17, 2026 · 107 upvotes (top 8%) · 0 views
Niche: database management systems and engines · 162 launches, 5 in the last 7 days ▼ -17% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Search & retrieval
- Developer
- AI-native
- Commercial product
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 162 launches in database management systems and engines →
Could you build this?
No Creating a distributed database engine unifying full-text inverted indices, HNSW vector search, and graph traversal with consensus in Go is a complex systems and distributed algorithms challenge.
What it would actually take: Building Antfly requires a storage engine (like Pebble/LMDB or custom LSM-tree), an inverted index implementation (similar to Bleve/Lucene), an in-memory or disk-backed HNSW/IVF vector index, and distributed consensus (Raft). It demands distributed systems expertise to coordinate partition sharding, WAL replication, and multi-modal query execution plans across nodes.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Neo4j, Antfly (self-reference), ValKey, OpenSearch
Concerns raised: Resource contention between indexing and query latency, Model cold starts in single-process mode, Unclear value proposition of graph features over SQL, ELv2 license restrictions on managed service offerings, Project not open source
Feature requests: Support for custom content types beyond classic formats, Pause/resume index backfill operations, Deterministic simulation testing capabilities
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 138 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #24 of 139 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 133 days after the earliest competitor.
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