Show HN: Antfly: Distributed, Multimodal Search and Memory and Graphs in Go
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!
Discussion Highlights (10 comments)
thefogman
Interesting project. I’ve got a project right now, separate vector DB, Elasticsearch, graph store, all for an agent system. When you say Antfly combines all three, what does that actually look like at query time? Can I write one query that does semantic similarity + full-text + graph traversal together, or is it more like three separate indexes that happen to live in the same binary? Does it ship with a CLI that's actually good? I’m pivoting away from MCP. Like can I pipe stuff in, run queries, manage indexes from the terminal without needing to write a client? That matters more to me than the MCP server honestly. And re: Termite + single binary, is the idea that I can just run `antfly swarm`, throw docs and images at it, and have a working local RAG setup with no API keys? If so, that might save me a lot of docker-compose work. Who's actually running this distributed vs. single-node? Curious what the typical user experience looks like.
jnstrdm05
This looks sick! Did you build this for yourself?
didip
in the query_test.go, I don’t see how the hybrid search is being exercised. For fun I am making hybrid search too and would love to see how you merge the two list (semantic and keyword) and rerank the importance score.
Linell
This is very interesting! I noticed that your TypeScript SDK link results in a 404: https://antfly.io/docs/sdks -> https://github.com/antflydb/antfly-ts
SkyPuncher
Can you help me understand what type of practical features Graph Traversal unlocks? I've seen it on a few products and it doesn't click with me how people are using it.
mrprincerawat
Was thinking to create something similar, well done!
schmichael
As a longtime Raft user (via hashicorp/raft), I'm curious about your Raft implementation! You mention etcd's Raft library, but it isn't natively Multi-Raft is it? Is your implementation similar to https://tikv.org/deep-dive/scalability/multi-raft/ ? I'd love to hear about your experience implementing and testing it!
prosdev
Of course the two most visionary people I worked with at Lytics went and built this. Just in time... this is the vector database I actually need. Termite is the killer feature for me, native ML inference in a single binary means I can stop duct-taping together embedding APIs for my projects. Excited to spend the upcoming weekends hacking on the Antfly ecosystem.
perfmode
Curious why you decided to go with Go. Instead of Rust for instance.
perfmode
https://github.com/antflydb/antfly/blob/main/src/store/db/in... Comment on the Pause method indicates that waits for in flight Batch operations (by obtaining the lock) but Batch doesn’t appear to hold the lock during the batch operation. Am I missing something?