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!
Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47414291
Points: 39
# Comments: 17
