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No offense to the author, and looks like a cool initiative. But isn't the whole point of things like Aurora serverless that it's a managed service that you don'

No offense to the author, and looks like a cool initiative. But isn't the whole point of things like Aurora serverless that it's a managed service that you don't have to worry about. Who would self host it? I see this a lot w/ open source projects... the first question is where's the cloud version.

kwerk 4y ago
The repo mentions a “free tier” and their website describes managed service.
nikita 4y ago
The cloud version is at neon.tech. The foundation of serverless is separation of storage and compute. This cloud native storage is proprietary at AWS Aurora (and architecture is old). Neons storage is open source
orev 4y ago
The problem with using managed services is you dump a ton of time making a solution that uses their custom APIs, and then you can be held for ransom to them because they can keep raising the price and you have nowhere to go. Having alternatives that are API compatible is a great way to ensure competition and protect against this.
- nikita 4y ago
  This is precisely right. Another point is that separation of storage and compute is decisively the right architecture for the cloud. Large cloud providers build their own implementation of this architecture which fragments the ecosystem. Having a canonical open source implementation just makes sense.
- smitty1e 4y ago
  One specific issue is data exfiltration. Cloud providers can turn into a Hotel California when the tera- and petabyte costs for liberating one's assets are calculated.
scosman 4y ago
This has a few big improvements over Aurora. Aurora has scaleable disk, but is still 1 big master Postgres instance (and optional read replicas), with all the drawbacks that comes with in scaling speed, cost and failure modes. This appears to be a distributed many-peer-node Postgres, with an all new abstracted distributed storage layer. This allows a lot of neat things with scaling/cost, and innovation on the storage layer (like their writeout to S3). Basically this is true serverless postgres if the claims are correct, and that's amazing.

kwerk 4y ago

The repo mentions a “free tier” and their website describes managed service.

nikita 4y ago

The cloud version is at neon.tech. The foundation of serverless is separation of storage and compute. This cloud native storage is proprietary at AWS Aurora (and architecture is old). Neons storage is open source

orev 4y ago

The problem with using managed services is you dump a ton of time making a solution that uses their custom APIs, and then you can be held for ransom to them because they can keep raising the price and you have nowhere to go. Having alternatives that are API compatible is a great way to ensure competition and protect against this.

nikita 4y ago
This is precisely right. Another point is that separation of storage and compute is decisively the right architecture for the cloud. Large cloud providers build their own implementation of this architecture which fragments the ecosystem. Having a canonical open source implementation just makes sense.
smitty1e 4y ago
One specific issue is data exfiltration. Cloud providers can turn into a Hotel California when the tera- and petabyte costs for liberating one's assets are calculated.

scosman 4y ago

This has a few big improvements over Aurora. Aurora has scaleable disk, but is still 1 big master Postgres instance (and optional read replicas), with all the drawbacks that comes with in scaling speed, cost and failure modes. This appears to be a distributed many-peer-node Postgres, with an all new abstracted distributed storage layer. This allows a lot of neat things with scaling/cost, and innovation on the storage layer (like their writeout to S3). Basically this is true serverless postgres if the claims are correct, and that's amazing.