10 ms·

This is the missing piece on cloud for masses * we already have compute scale-to-zero (cloudrun, lambda, fly.io). * Network is default pay for use. Storag

This is the missing piece on cloud for masses * we already have compute scale-to-zero (cloudrun, lambda, fly.io). * Network is default pay for use. Storage (S3) is default pay for use. * The only piece in the stack that was always-on was the database (only serverless db thus far was firestore, or something like sqlite+litestream) With something like this we get a solid RDBMS engineered to be scale-to-zero, and with good developer experience. This opens up a world of try-out mini applications that cost cents to host. serverless db (postgres) + serverless compute (cloud-run) + use as you go storage+network. This is a paradigm-shift stack. Exciting days ahead.

pid-1 4y ago
Fly.io does not scale to zero. Lambda has many limitations. In particular, for some reason AWS is allergic to providing a container deployment service that actually scales to zero.
- russellendicott 4y ago
  > AWS is allergic to providing a container deployment service that actually scales to zero Isn't this what Fargate is?
  - pid-1 4y ago
    No.
- hamandcheese 4y ago
  Not yet, but soon.
jokethrowaway 4y ago
I don't see the benefits over a 5$ VPS. Even admitting I'll save a few cents over a VPS (which is absolutely not guaranteed), the cost saving is so minimal I won't bother rewriting everything under the serverless paradigm just for it. Of course if your cloud doesn't cost an eye and an arm. I can understand people excited to save on expensive Aws instances but maybe you should just consider dumping Aws. Scale doesn't matter for mini applications and scaling vertically (=throw money for a bigger server) will work for 99% of the companies. The 1% who need horizontal scaling will have custom everything regardless and will need to hire experts, not a good niche to release a product.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  I do. There are real benefits to using a hosted server for large projects (think hundreds of gigabytes to terabytes of data) because getting sharding, fallbacks, and downtimeless maintenance right is difficult, risky, and expensive. These are reasons why one might go for a hosted database at AWS/GCE/Azure. There are tons of good servers out there for small to medium projects and I don't think this service is right for those, unless they can make do with the free tier. The real benefit is in the larger cloud application space. A system that does this type of scaling automatically while also reducing the dependency on a single cloud provider's service can be a gamechanger for some companies with huge database servers that risk getting locked in. I think using this service for most existing applications will introduce a performance drop, a rise in expenses, and a complicated migration path, but on the other hand I think that developing against this system for new projects that are very likely to grow in scale will end up with some major data control benefits. The open source nature also allows for competitors in markets like the EU to start serving databases that don't break privacy laws (although most companies don't care until they receive a fine). I'm not sure how this company will become profitable while giving away its special sauce that can be modified to run at competing companies relatively easily, but that's a whole different story.
rektide 4y ago
> This is the missing piece on cloud for masses I like this perspective a lot & think it's absolutely key here. We- the world- still pick single-node writer postgres & read replicas when we have to store & query data. There's great Kubernetes postgres operators, but it's still a distinctly pre-cloud pre-scale type of technology, & this decoupling & shared-storage sounds ultra promising, allows independent & radicaly scale up & scale down, sounds principally much more managable.
hamandcheese 4y ago
If you can scale your app to zero, couldn’t you also just scale your database to zero once no more app servers are running? Or for try-out apps, as you mention, you could just run Postgres next to your app in the same container. This might be possible with fly.io, or will soon, I think. I’m not sure how comfortable I am using a custom flavor of Postgres (even if it’s just the storage layer).
antender 4y ago
We already had serverless db for ages and it's called ... Google Sheets. You can even query it with simple SQL-like language. The problem with most other "serverless" databases is that they don't offer HTTP API to query them from restricted environments like serverless functions.
guggleet 4y ago
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-aurora-serverless-v2-is-generally-available-instant-scaling-for-demanding-workloads/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-aurora-serverless-v2...
- fitzoh 4y ago
  No scale to zero unfortunately
  - res0nat0r 4y ago
    It does scale to zero no? > It automatically starts up, shuts down, and scales capacity up or down based on your application's needs. The only tradeoff is the additional latency someone will have when connecting to the db after it has shutdown and waiting for it to spin back up and become ready.
    - ldoughty 4y ago
      AWS aurora serverless says: > You pay only for the capacity your application consumes. > Scales down to 0.5 But it actually can't scale down to 0.5 or the DB falls over just existing.. auto scaling won't let you go down that low unless you set 0.5 as the max, which literally makes it not scale up, and it's dead, because the DB can't run with that little CPU. So it's fair to ask if neon can scale to 0, both in marketing, and in practice.
      - ololobus 4y ago
        We do scale compute part down to zero after 5 mins of inactivity now (no active transactions). This 5 mins threshold is a random pick, it could be 1 min or 30 mins later, or even customizable by the end-user. Storage part is heavily multi-tenant, so it's always running and our main objective is to make resource utilization as effective as possible. It still has a significant latency on the first connection attempt after suspend (1-2 seconds), but we are working on that and it seems to be realistic to put the startup time under 1 sec. Pricing model is still work-in-progress, so cannot say much about it. Yet, my personal intention is to make it cost-effective for both end-user and us. I'd prefer to don't build a service with claims like 'here is your free-tier serverless Postgres with zero-latency on connect', which actually means that under the hood there is an always-running compute burning the investors money. Hope it's realistic to achieve :) -- Cloud engineer @ Neon
derefr 4y ago
Snowflake is probably the closest comparison.
- nikita 4y ago
  Some users called us Snowflake for OLTP, some others Snowflake for Postgres. Obv b/c of separation of storage and compute.
TruthWillHurt 4y ago
uh... AWS Aurora? Azure CosmosDB? GCP BigQuery? All serverless, scale-to-zero or pay for demand...
- antifa 4y ago
  GCP BigQuery is unusably slow for small datasets and is more like redshift/athena than postgres.
manigandham 4y ago
There are plenty of serverless database options already: Firestore, DynamoDB, CosmosDB, FaunaDB, even MongoDB, and there are "newsql" distributed relational systems like CockroachDB and Planetscale with serverless plans.
- pid-1 4y ago
  Most stuff you mentioned: 1 - Is not an actual relational DB 2- Doesn't really scale to zero Planetscale does scale to zero, but has a ridiculous billing model.
  - acjohnson55 4y ago
    What's the billing model / how is it ridiculous?
    - pid-1 4y ago
      Per row read / write billing -> how do you estimate that?
      - derekperkins 4y ago
        Either you have an existing db running and check the metrics, or you don't have a workload to move and you can just try it out from scratch. You can always migrate away if the billing model doesn't work for you. Alternatively, it's likely that Planetscale will eventually provide a provisioned billing model, similar to DynamoDB. Then you can choose between scalable usage based pricing or less flexible flat rate pricing. Either way, innovating different billing models for RDBMS is a win.
  - manigandham 4y ago
    Both CRDB and Planetscale "scale" to zero - but neither expose any concept of individual instances so I'm still not sure what difference it makes.
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
logifail 4y ago
> This opens up a world of try-out mini applications that cost cents to host Given how much performance you can squeeze out of a $5/month VPS (I've been spinning them up and indeed down regularly over the last couple of years), is this really a paradigm shift?
- anilgulecha 4y ago
  Millions of students and enthusiasts around the world would find that cost sufficiently friction-ful to not try out things.
  - kortilla 4y ago
    Who absolutely would not want to give a credit card to AWS where a bill is dynamic. If $5/mo is bad they definitely can’t handle the screw up that scales up and runs overnight for $500.
  - vidarh 4y ago
    Free tier instances on various providers provides an option. And if you can't afford $5 a month you really shouldn't be playing with services where there's a risk of huge overages if you face a sudden spike in users.
    - avinassh 4y ago
      You cannot sign up on AWS Free Tier without the credit card info and many students end up with a huge bill. This sub reddit.com/r/aws/ has many such posts. Some links and discussions: - https://cloudirregular.substack.com/p/please-fix-the-aws-free-tier-before?s=r https://cloudirregular.substack.com/p/please-fix-the-aws-fre... - https://twitter.com/alexwlchan/status/1399095011178958851 https://twitter.com/alexwlchan/status/1399095011178958851 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27044371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27044371
      - vidarh 4y ago
        Well, and that is just as much of an issue if you use most serverless offerings. But you're not prepared to carefully manage your use, cloud services should not even be on your radar.
8organicbits 4y ago
What's the cold start time for something using sqlite+lightstream on scale-to-zero compute? I think you'd need to pull the db out of storage, so I would be slow to go from 0->1 instance. Anyone know if that's right? Is there any cold start delay for neon?
- nikita 4y ago
  Right now it is 2 seconds. We are working on improving it.
dragonwriter 4y ago
AWS Aurora Serverless v1 (in MySQL and Postgres flavors) has had serverless, scale-to-zero for quite a while.
- shaicoleman 4y ago
  Aurora Serverless v1 has cold boot times of ~30 seconds when scaling up to zero, which precludes it from being a viable option for most usecases
- pid-1 4y ago
  Unfortunately V1 is getting very little love from AWS and the new one, V2, does not scale to zero.

pid-1 4y ago

Fly.io does not scale to zero. Lambda has many limitations. In particular, for some reason AWS is allergic to providing a container deployment service that actually scales to zero.

russellendicott 4y ago
> AWS is allergic to providing a container deployment service that actually scales to zero Isn't this what Fargate is?
- pid-1 4y ago
  No.
hamandcheese 4y ago
Not yet, but soon.

jokethrowaway 4y ago

I don't see the benefits over a 5$ VPS. Even admitting I'll save a few cents over a VPS (which is absolutely not guaranteed), the cost saving is so minimal I won't bother rewriting everything under the serverless paradigm just for it. Of course if your cloud doesn't cost an eye and an arm. I can understand people excited to save on expensive Aws instances but maybe you should just consider dumping Aws. Scale doesn't matter for mini applications and scaling vertically (=throw money for a bigger server) will work for 99% of the companies. The 1% who need horizontal scaling will have custom everything regardless and will need to hire experts, not a good niche to release a product.

jeroenhd 4y ago
I do. There are real benefits to using a hosted server for large projects (think hundreds of gigabytes to terabytes of data) because getting sharding, fallbacks, and downtimeless maintenance right is difficult, risky, and expensive. These are reasons why one might go for a hosted database at AWS/GCE/Azure. There are tons of good servers out there for small to medium projects and I don't think this service is right for those, unless they can make do with the free tier. The real benefit is in the larger cloud application space. A system that does this type of scaling automatically while also reducing the dependency on a single cloud provider's service can be a gamechanger for some companies with huge database servers that risk getting locked in. I think using this service for most existing applications will introduce a performance drop, a rise in expenses, and a complicated migration path, but on the other hand I think that developing against this system for new projects that are very likely to grow in scale will end up with some major data control benefits. The open source nature also allows for competitors in markets like the EU to start serving databases that don't break privacy laws (although most companies don't care until they receive a fine). I'm not sure how this company will become profitable while giving away its special sauce that can be modified to run at competing companies relatively easily, but that's a whole different story.

rektide 4y ago

> This is the missing piece on cloud for masses I like this perspective a lot & think it's absolutely key here. We- the world- still pick single-node writer postgres & read replicas when we have to store & query data. There's great Kubernetes postgres operators, but it's still a distinctly pre-cloud pre-scale type of technology, & this decoupling & shared-storage sounds ultra promising, allows independent & radicaly scale up & scale down, sounds principally much more managable.

hamandcheese 4y ago

If you can scale your app to zero, couldn’t you also just scale your database to zero once no more app servers are running? Or for try-out apps, as you mention, you could just run Postgres next to your app in the same container. This might be possible with fly.io, or will soon, I think. I’m not sure how comfortable I am using a custom flavor of Postgres (even if it’s just the storage layer).

antender 4y ago

We already had serverless db for ages and it's called ... Google Sheets. You can even query it with simple SQL-like language. The problem with most other "serverless" databases is that they don't offer HTTP API to query them from restricted environments like serverless functions.

guggleet 4y ago

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-aurora-serverless-v2-is-generally-available-instant-scaling-for-demanding-workloads/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-aurora-serverless-v2...

fitzoh 4y ago
No scale to zero unfortunately
- res0nat0r 4y ago
  It does scale to zero no? > It automatically starts up, shuts down, and scales capacity up or down based on your application's needs. The only tradeoff is the additional latency someone will have when connecting to the db after it has shutdown and waiting for it to spin back up and become ready.
  - ldoughty 4y ago
    AWS aurora serverless says: > You pay only for the capacity your application consumes. > Scales down to 0.5 But it actually can't scale down to 0.5 or the DB falls over just existing.. auto scaling won't let you go down that low unless you set 0.5 as the max, which literally makes it not scale up, and it's dead, because the DB can't run with that little CPU. So it's fair to ask if neon can scale to 0, both in marketing, and in practice.
    - ololobus 4y ago
      We do scale compute part down to zero after 5 mins of inactivity now (no active transactions). This 5 mins threshold is a random pick, it could be 1 min or 30 mins later, or even customizable by the end-user. Storage part is heavily multi-tenant, so it's always running and our main objective is to make resource utilization as effective as possible. It still has a significant latency on the first connection attempt after suspend (1-2 seconds), but we are working on that and it seems to be realistic to put the startup time under 1 sec. Pricing model is still work-in-progress, so cannot say much about it. Yet, my personal intention is to make it cost-effective for both end-user and us. I'd prefer to don't build a service with claims like 'here is your free-tier serverless Postgres with zero-latency on connect', which actually means that under the hood there is an always-running compute burning the investors money. Hope it's realistic to achieve :) -- Cloud engineer @ Neon

derefr 4y ago

Snowflake is probably the closest comparison.

nikita 4y ago
Some users called us Snowflake for OLTP, some others Snowflake for Postgres. Obv b/c of separation of storage and compute.

TruthWillHurt 4y ago

uh... AWS Aurora? Azure CosmosDB? GCP BigQuery? All serverless, scale-to-zero or pay for demand...

antifa 4y ago
GCP BigQuery is unusably slow for small datasets and is more like redshift/athena than postgres.

manigandham 4y ago

There are plenty of serverless database options already: Firestore, DynamoDB, CosmosDB, FaunaDB, even MongoDB, and there are "newsql" distributed relational systems like CockroachDB and Planetscale with serverless plans.

pid-1 4y ago
Most stuff you mentioned: 1 - Is not an actual relational DB 2- Doesn't really scale to zero Planetscale does scale to zero, but has a ridiculous billing model.
- acjohnson55 4y ago
  What's the billing model / how is it ridiculous?
  - pid-1 4y ago
    Per row read / write billing -> how do you estimate that?
    - derekperkins 4y ago
      Either you have an existing db running and check the metrics, or you don't have a workload to move and you can just try it out from scratch. You can always migrate away if the billing model doesn't work for you. Alternatively, it's likely that Planetscale will eventually provide a provisioned billing model, similar to DynamoDB. Then you can choose between scalable usage based pricing or less flexible flat rate pricing. Either way, innovating different billing models for RDBMS is a win.
- manigandham 4y ago
  Both CRDB and Planetscale "scale" to zero - but neither expose any concept of individual instances so I'm still not sure what difference it makes.
jillesvangurp 4y ago

logifail 4y ago

> This opens up a world of try-out mini applications that cost cents to host Given how much performance you can squeeze out of a $5/month VPS (I've been spinning them up and indeed down regularly over the last couple of years), is this really a paradigm shift?

anilgulecha 4y ago
Millions of students and enthusiasts around the world would find that cost sufficiently friction-ful to not try out things.
- kortilla 4y ago
  Who absolutely would not want to give a credit card to AWS where a bill is dynamic. If $5/mo is bad they definitely can’t handle the screw up that scales up and runs overnight for $500.
- vidarh 4y ago
  Free tier instances on various providers provides an option. And if you can't afford $5 a month you really shouldn't be playing with services where there's a risk of huge overages if you face a sudden spike in users.
  - avinassh 4y ago
    You cannot sign up on AWS Free Tier without the credit card info and many students end up with a huge bill. This sub reddit.com/r/aws/ has many such posts. Some links and discussions: - https://cloudirregular.substack.com/p/please-fix-the-aws-free-tier-before?s=r https://cloudirregular.substack.com/p/please-fix-the-aws-fre... - https://twitter.com/alexwlchan/status/1399095011178958851 https://twitter.com/alexwlchan/status/1399095011178958851 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27044371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27044371
    - vidarh 4y ago
      Well, and that is just as much of an issue if you use most serverless offerings. But you're not prepared to carefully manage your use, cloud services should not even be on your radar.

8organicbits 4y ago

What's the cold start time for something using sqlite+lightstream on scale-to-zero compute? I think you'd need to pull the db out of storage, so I would be slow to go from 0->1 instance. Anyone know if that's right? Is there any cold start delay for neon?

nikita 4y ago
Right now it is 2 seconds. We are working on improving it.

dragonwriter 4y ago

AWS Aurora Serverless v1 (in MySQL and Postgres flavors) has had serverless, scale-to-zero for quite a while.

shaicoleman 4y ago
Aurora Serverless v1 has cold boot times of ~30 seconds when scaling up to zero, which precludes it from being a viable option for most usecases
pid-1 4y ago
Unfortunately V1 is getting very little love from AWS and the new one, V2, does not scale to zero.