Neon Blog

Most my personal and side-business projects have very spiky load or just low load in general. Because of that I love using AWS Lambda as my backend since it scales to 0 and scales to whatever you have your limits set at. I use SST [0] for my backend with NodeJS (TypeScript) and Vue (Quasar) for my frontend. For my database I use either Postgres or DynamoDB if the fit is right (Single Table Design is really neat). For Postgres I like Neon [1] though their recent pricing changes make it less appealing. [0] https://sst.dev [1] https://neon.tech

There is a good alternative, https://neon.tech check them out. Really good bunch. Product is great and it's open-sourced https://github.com/neondatabase/neon

When a blob is saved, first I write it to Postgres (https://neon.tech), so that ensures there's a persisting backup. However, it's typically a waste of money to store infrequently accessed blobs in disk with Postgres over months and years. After 4-6 weeks data is offloaded to object storage - so that you benefit from low long term storage costs. The lifecycle of a blob works out roughly something like as follows, based on last read date: < 30 mins ago - In-Memory: Cloudflare CDN < 30 days ago - In-Disk: Redis Auto-Tiering Memory/Disk combination - In-Disk: Postgres > 30 days ago - Object Storage: Backblaze B2

Fly.io's pricing seems fair. It's not amazingly cheap, but there aren't a lot of PaaS offerings out there and most are very expensive and have complicated pricing compared to Fly.io - even Digital Ocean's AppPlatform is more expensive. I am curious about the freemium model for PaaS systems. I've always wondered what percent of compute ends up being free and if the paid prices have to be higher to subsidize the free tier. Would it be better for the paying customers if the service was 30% cheaper and there was no free tier? Of course, I might be incredibly far off on how much the free tier customers cost. I think for people that think Fly.io is expensive, it just feels like what Fly.io does should be table stakes rather than a premium service in 2022 - and yet it's so hard to find! Heroku is 15 years old and Fly.io feels like the first platform I've used since that just gets it. I would say that a collaboration between you and Neon (https://neon.tech/) would be pretty cool. While your site does link to Neon as a recommendation, Neon's datacenters often aren't that proximal to Fly.io's - Ohio isn't that close to Chicago, Virginia, or New Jersey. Maybe that'll get better in the future. I'd always love it if Fly.io were cheaper, but more than that I'm glad that Fly.io seems to really get what customers need.

They offer serverless Postgres. Here's a link if anyone else needs it https://neon.tech/

It's been a while since I've looked at elastic pools in Azure, but maybe Neon (https://neon.tech/) or recently Nile (https://www.thenile.dev/) might work in terms of spinning up a bunch of separate logical DBs with shared compute/storage.

Designers today are largely driven by trends (just like engineering?). Being cool = jumping on the latest bandwagon, not being unique or better. The good news is this particular style is pretty much restricted to tech companies, I think it started with https://neon.tech a few years ago or a similar startup. Incidentally, the same behaviour is seen in academia. These websites for papers are all copying this one from 2020: https://nerfies.github.io/

Not sure if I'm addressing your point correctly, but Kardinal does have the concept of external services and provides a plugin system that allows you to manage stateful external services. Here is an example [1] of a plugin to manage Neon [2] (a serverless Postgres DB with support for branches). You can find more information about plugins here: https://kardinal.dev/docs/concepts/plugins [1] https://github.com/kurtosis-tech/neondb-plugin [2] https://neon.tech/

We just announced upcoming Azure support today[0]. Right now we are fully invested in AWS and Azure. Launching in additional regions can take quite a bit of work, but that pales in comparison to another cloud. We'd love to launch everywhere that our customers or potential customers are, but it also requires a larger team. We've been hiring[1] for Azure-specific positions recently, and I assume we would do the same for GCP, OCI, or IBM Cloud. [0]: https://neon.tech/blog/neon-is-coming-to-azure [1]: https://neon.tech/careers

The company's site https://neon.tech/ made it easier to understand what it is, for me. The Github README struggles with identifying its audience, IMO.

from their homepage > Xata is the only serverless data platform for PostgreSQL. ummm. what about https://neon.tech/?

easy to slam others but I don't see what's bizarre about the article. It highlights a successful customer story where Neon (https://neon.tech) played a significant role in improving their db management with its db branching feature. Yes, caching and pooling helped, but Neon made their testing and development much faster and efficient and it's not easy to write such detailed articles. why not any constructive feedback which can help them?

Yes, we have great APIs ( https://neon.tech/docs/reference/api-reference ) and a Terraform provider ( https://registry.terraform.io/providers/terraform-community-providers/… )

Migrated away when they removed the free tier, ended up using https://neon.tech/

Cool! At Neon[0], I work full time on our custom postgres proxy[1]. It's a very nice protocol to work with, although our usecase is quite a bit more complex compared to the ideas presented in the post. Neon databases scale to zero, so the proxy needs to spin up databases on the fly. The proxy doesn't do that but it knows if the databases is running and asks our control plane to schedule it if it isn't. It's a fun service to maintain. The biggest pain is error handling. Postgres is really bad for error messages and codes. The only available code we can use is usually protocol violation... [0]: https://neon.tech/ [1]: https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/tree/main/proxy

Yea this seems like a gift for https://neon.tech/, https://turso.tech/ and https://developers.cloudflare.com/d1/. Planetscale is definitely popular and they get a lot of free advertisement from tech influencers (may change without the free tier) but most people I know in enterprise haven't heard of it.

I mentioned Neon because it is open source and the article says "Not OSS" for "DBMS-optimized cloud storage". Think of it as open-source Aurora https://neon.tech/

It's a slightly different use case, but https://neon.tech may interest you and is actually Open Source (Apache 2) https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/blob/main/LICENSE

https://neon.tech/docs/introduction/branching is exactly what the author is looking for and is the best way to do highly efficient point-in-time versioning of Postgres data I have seen so far. I deployed NeonDB in a large enterprise client in Q2 of this year and, yes, the initial data migration is the hard part. We added 2x100gbe network cards directly on the VMware hosts where the data was so the migration to the Kubernetes cluster running NeonDB took hours instead of weeks.

Neon does something like this I believe. They allow you to "branch" your databases: https://neon.tech

I've only kicked the tires, but https://neon.tech is a pure hosted Postgres play. I'd be curious to hear if anyone has used them for a real projects, and how that went.

For anyone wondering what "Neon-like branching" is, this is worth a read: https://neon.tech/blog/database-branching-for-postgres-with-neon

I think Neon is heading in the direction of Planetscale but for Postgres https://neon.tech

Okey, maybe I do not understand something but how is https://neon.tech not auto-scaling? Or the more expensive option at AWS Aurora?

A few weeks back, we released pg_embedding[1], a new extension for Postgres and LangChain which introduced Hierarchical Navigable Small Worlds (HNSW) indexes for vector similarity search. This new indexing method resulted in 20x faster queries at a 99% accuracy compared to traditional IVFFlat indexing[2]. Today, we released a new version which includes the following improvements: 1. The HNSW index is now constructed on disk instead of in memory 2. The extension now supports Cosine, Manhattan, and Euclidean distances [1]: https://github.com/neondatabase/pg_embedding [2]: https://neon.tech/blog/pg-embedding-extension-for-vector-search

Well, the data is absolutely not ephemeral: it's safely tucked away in S3. But to crib from https://neon.tech, you might choose Neon because it's scalable, cost-effective, and easy to deploy and manage. Or you might choose it for its copy-on-write branching and point-in-time recovery, all open-source, and all on top of the solid, performant, feature-rich foundation that is Postgres. :)

> Will EdgeDB Cloud be fully replicated similar to https://neon.tech? Eventually yes. Our client libraries APIs are designed in such a way that it's easy for us to automatically route read queries to the nearest replicas and do other magic. > I want to use EdgeDB Cloud but I want the latency to be that of Grafbase for example. We'll be working on lowering the latency as much as we can. But you also have to keep in mind another aspect - which is the composability of EdgeQL, which allows you to pipeline multiple operations in one query. That query will get you all of your data in one round trip, something that doesn't typically happen with ORM libraries and SQL in general. > 3.0 looks very exciting, well done. Thank you!

Will EdgeDB Cloud be fully replicated similar to https://neon.tech? I want to use EdgeDB Cloud but I want the latency to be that of Grafbase for example. benchmark here: https://edge-data-latency.vercel.app I know EdgeDB exposes GraphQL as part of plugin. I assume EdgeDB Cloud lets you setup production GraphQL setup without any effort? 3.0 looks very exciting, well done.

For the moment all workloads are stateless, but you can already connect to external databases. There are "serverless" DB providers like Neon [1]. Persistence is on the roadmap though. [1] https://neon.tech/

Damn, 30 days is quick. I found out about https://neon.tech but then quickly ran into a major bug, and then thankfully found out about bit.io, which is what I use for https://dittoed.app. Looks like I will have to go back to neon (they fixed the bug). If anyone has other ideas, I'm all ears. Project is hosted on Cloudflare and they have D1 now, but Dittoed uses a little bit of PostGIS.