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Amazing work by the Team. Congrats y'all. It was one of the best presentations in the PGcon22. I did email Heikki the following questions, in case if someone f

by vira28 4y ago

Amazing work by the Team. Congrats y'all. It was one of the best presentations in the PGcon22. I did email Heikki the following questions, in case if someone from Neon is around here. a) How does Neon compare to polardb https://github.com/ApsaraDB/PolarDB-for-PostgreSQL https://github.com/ApsaraDB/PolarDB-for-PostgreSQL. b) The readme mentions a component "Repository - Neon storage implementation". Does it use any special FileSystem? Any links to read more about it? c) Heard the cold start is a second (IIRC), how does that value differ if one runs Neon on bare metal instead of k8s?

ololobus 4y ago
> c) Heard the cold start is a second (IIRC), how does that value differ if one runs Neon on bare metal instead of k8s? Yeah, as Nikita mentioned it's 2 seconds now. We did some tests and measurements and on bare metal, it's sub 500 ms usually, so the remaining part is the k8s (+ our own control plane) orchestration overhead. For example, with plain Docker (which we use in CI in addition to k8s) it's around 1 second already. K8s provides a convenient abstraction layer, though. So I think that we'll continue using it and optimization will come with pods pool / over-provisioning and it'll be realistic to bring the startup time closer to bare-metal. -- Cloud engineer @ Neon
nikita 4y ago
Thank you! a. PolarDB is based on a similar idea. https://www.cs.utah.edu/~lifeifei/papers/polardbserverless-sigmod21.pdf https://www.cs.utah.edu/~lifeifei/papers/polardbserverless-s.... This paper describes it. The biggest difference that I see glancing through the paper is that we really integrated S3 into the storage. In Neon architecture branches, backups, checkpoint are all the same thing and instant to run. This simplifies a good amount of database management AND deliver on better costs. S3 is cheap. b. Neon doesn't need a special filesystem. Neon storage is in a way a filesystem, however it doesn't expose filesystem API. It's a key value store - serves 8k pages to Postgres and a consensus - update API to the key value store. Pages are organized in LSM trees and background processes put layers of the LSM trees to S3. c. The cols start is 2sec right now. There is a dependency on K8S. Bare metal implementation will require new code to orchestrate starts and stops.
- 1500100900 4y ago
  > we really integrated S3 into the storage Will it be possible to use something else in place of S3? I'm thinking on-premise or what some would call a private cloud.
  - mattashii 4y ago
    Right now, it should be possible to use anything that is compatible with the S3 API, as our current focus is on getting the product to the market. Once the business model is proven, we'll likely branch out to other clouds, with their storage providers. If you can't wait that long to run Neon on your own cloud, feel free to contribute an integration to your persistent blob storage: the code is available under APLv2 here: https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/ https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/
- unraveller 4y ago
  >serves 8k pages to Postgres will page size be tunable on neon cloud for larger datasets?
  - nikita 4y ago
    No Postgres only requires 8K. One can imagine adapting Neon storage to other engines then of course this can be extended.
- timmg 4y ago
  The way you describe it, to me, is one of those “this sounds obvious in retrospect”. Sounds completely elegant and “right”. Congratulations on a great idea. I really hope you pull it off!
  - nikita 4y ago
    Thank you! We are super hard at work. You can see our velocity here: https://github.com/neondatabase/neon https://github.com/neondatabase/neon
- 4y ago
avinassh 4y ago
> It was one of the best presentations in the PGcon22. I can't find it on Youtube, do you have the link? edit: I found the link, seems it is not on the Youtube yet: https://www.pgcon.org/events/pgcon_2022/schedule/session/236-neon-cloud-native-storage-backend-for-postgresql/ https://www.pgcon.org/events/pgcon_2022/schedule/session/236...
- nikita 4y ago
  I can't recommend this presentation enough!

by vira28 4y ago

ololobus 4y ago

> c) Heard the cold start is a second (IIRC), how does that value differ if one runs Neon on bare metal instead of k8s? Yeah, as Nikita mentioned it's 2 seconds now. We did some tests and measurements and on bare metal, it's sub 500 ms usually, so the remaining part is the k8s (+ our own control plane) orchestration overhead. For example, with plain Docker (which we use in CI in addition to k8s) it's around 1 second already. K8s provides a convenient abstraction layer, though. So I think that we'll continue using it and optimization will come with pods pool / over-provisioning and it'll be realistic to bring the startup time closer to bare-metal. -- Cloud engineer @ Neon

nikita 4y ago

Thank you! a. PolarDB is based on a similar idea. https://www.cs.utah.edu/~lifeifei/papers/polardbserverless-sigmod21.pdf https://www.cs.utah.edu/~lifeifei/papers/polardbserverless-s.... This paper describes it. The biggest difference that I see glancing through the paper is that we really integrated S3 into the storage. In Neon architecture branches, backups, checkpoint are all the same thing and instant to run. This simplifies a good amount of database management AND deliver on better costs. S3 is cheap. b. Neon doesn't need a special filesystem. Neon storage is in a way a filesystem, however it doesn't expose filesystem API. It's a key value store - serves 8k pages to Postgres and a consensus - update API to the key value store. Pages are organized in LSM trees and background processes put layers of the LSM trees to S3. c. The cols start is 2sec right now. There is a dependency on K8S. Bare metal implementation will require new code to orchestrate starts and stops.

1500100900 4y ago
> we really integrated S3 into the storage Will it be possible to use something else in place of S3? I'm thinking on-premise or what some would call a private cloud.
- mattashii 4y ago
  Right now, it should be possible to use anything that is compatible with the S3 API, as our current focus is on getting the product to the market. Once the business model is proven, we'll likely branch out to other clouds, with their storage providers. If you can't wait that long to run Neon on your own cloud, feel free to contribute an integration to your persistent blob storage: the code is available under APLv2 here: https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/ https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/
unraveller 4y ago
>serves 8k pages to Postgres will page size be tunable on neon cloud for larger datasets?
- nikita 4y ago
  No Postgres only requires 8K. One can imagine adapting Neon storage to other engines then of course this can be extended.
timmg 4y ago
The way you describe it, to me, is one of those “this sounds obvious in retrospect”. Sounds completely elegant and “right”. Congratulations on a great idea. I really hope you pull it off!
- nikita 4y ago
  Thank you! We are super hard at work. You can see our velocity here: https://github.com/neondatabase/neon https://github.com/neondatabase/neon
4y ago

avinassh 4y ago

> It was one of the best presentations in the PGcon22. I can't find it on Youtube, do you have the link? edit: I found the link, seems it is not on the Youtube yet: https://www.pgcon.org/events/pgcon_2022/schedule/session/236-neon-cloud-native-storage-backend-for-postgresql/ https://www.pgcon.org/events/pgcon_2022/schedule/session/236...

nikita 4y ago
I can't recommend this presentation enough!