3 ms·

I'm CEO of Neon. Happy to answer any questions you might have.

by nikita 4y ago

amerine 4y ago
Is your geo-distributed read replicas going to lean on WAL replication?
- nikita 4y ago
  Yes, we are working on this at the moment. Since we control storage we will be implementing this at the storage level. From there we are thinking to expose <project_id>.read.neon.tech and <project_id>.write.neon.tech and for read queries route traffic to the local replica. It's not set in stone yet, but that's the gist of it.
  - amerine 4y ago
    Excellent. That work’s wonderfully for us too ;-)
evangow 4y ago
Any plans to introduce a way to connect to a Neon database without making it publicly accessible via the internet?
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  how would they do this? allow it to be added to a wireguard VPN or something?
  - koolba 4y ago
    Or within AWS world you can do VPC peering.
    - nikita 4y ago
      How about private link?
- nikita 4y ago
  Yes. What's your use case? Security or egress costs (those are 0 if you are in the same region).
  - evangow 4y ago
    Security
    - nikita 4y ago
      We are looking at private link for this. Will this work for you?
      - evangow 4y ago
        I haven't used PrivateLink before, but from my brief look, it looks like it would work.
r3trohack3r 4y ago
Neon looks like everything I've ever wanted out of a serverless database. I send a vendor pg compatible queries, vendor takes care of everything, charges me for usage - and connections work with 3rd party serverless runtimes. I have a number of workloads I'd migrate to you over the next few weeks if you're ready for it. What is the state of Neon? Is it ready for small-volume but business critical loads? I'm struggling to find support guarantees and SLAs on your website, do you have them yet? What is your off-site backup story? Can I export my backups to something like R2, S3, or B2? Many of my customers are running in Cloudflare Workers. Their volume is low, but it's business critical (DB downtime means business downtime - business will fail if we lose all the data).
- nikita 4y ago
  > I have a number of workloads I'd migrate to you over the next few weeks if you're ready for it. What is the state of Neon? Please do we will support it! We have 22K hosted databases on the platform and are quite stable. > Is it ready for small-volume but business critical loads? Depends on business criticality. But generally yes. We are debating internally when we are going to announce it. > I'm struggling to find support guarantees and SLAs on your website, do you have them yet? Good feedback. It's in the works. > What is your off-site backup story? Can I export my backups to something like R2, S3, or B2? Since our storage is integrated with s3 and supports branching we can treat branches as backups. > Many of my customers are running in Cloudflare Workers. Their volume is low, but it's business critical (DB downtime means business downtime - business will fail if we lose all the data). We haven't lost data yet. There are a lot of redundancy in the system. Safekeepers, S3, branches (backups).
slig 4y ago
Due to latency, Neon is only for AWS/GCP/Azure datacenters or can we use it from smaller providers, such as DO/Linode/etc?
- nikita 4y ago
  You can use in anywhere. We will keep working to drive GLOBAL latency down. As in connect to Neon from anywhere.
codegeek 4y ago
How do you compare against planetscale (I understand that they are mysql vs you postgres but I am looking for serverless db right now so business/product/support comparison is important)
- manigandham 4y ago
  Planetscale[1] is MySQL that is automatically sharded and proxied with a system called Vitess to scale horizontally. Because it's real MySQL, most functionality still works without the operations overhead. Neon[2] is Postgres that has a surgically enhanced data layer that reads from a distributed set of nodes and object storage, but is still a single Postgres instance that's started and stopped on-demand and not automatically sharded. Because it's real Postgres, all functionality works including extensions without dealing with issues from sharded datasets, but also without the horizontally scalability and instant start (so far). However because the data layer is improved, the actual compute node is much more efficient in both startup and processing so it works well in many scenarios. CockroachDB[3] is a proprietary distributed database built to Postgres wire/data protocol with natively separated storage and compute. Their serverless plan also starts and stops instances as traffic comes in but with fast startup because of their specific architecture. Because it's not real Postgres though, there's a good bit of missing functionality. There's also TiDB[4] from PingCap which is similar to a MySQL version of CockroachDB, and Yugabyte[5] which is somewhat like Neon but with both distributed compute and data layers also using real Postgres components - however neither has a serverless offering. 1. https://planetscale.com/ https://planetscale.com/ 2. https://neon.tech/ https://neon.tech/ 3. https://www.cockroachlabs.com/ https://www.cockroachlabs.com/ 4. https://www.pingcap.com/tidb/ https://www.pingcap.com/tidb/ 5. https://www.yugabyte.com/ https://www.yugabyte.com/
  - codegeek 4y ago
    Thank you. This is helpful.
sebk 4y ago
I'm glad to have an answer to the question I asked you 7 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32472443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32472443 (What's Neon's point of view about transient state in nodes? Is there a world where serverless client connections are stateless, or is the set up overhead not expected to be worth the cost?). This is a good analysis of network time and optimization. I'd love to see a followup exploring the impact on the server side; Considering how Postgres was historically not very efficient at setting up new connections but has been steadily getting better with each major release. It would also be great to see what portion of the request is taken up by the setup versus the query itself, to have some idea of cost.
irq-1 4y ago
Why do web services not discuss the metrics that were common for cloud servers? Like average response time and distribution, throughput, error rates, etc... and what can you tell us about neon?
Normal_gaussian 4y ago
I have a non-tech business approaching limited release. I'm very interested in two things: - Data safety and privacy. As I'm UK based - can my data be restricted to the UK only (no magic round the world trips inside your backend)? do you comply with the GDPR? - Can I set up postgres (WAL) replication to a non-neon database?
sarb 4y ago
Is the websocket connection opened directly from the client to the Postgres server? Or is the other end of the websocket tunnel terminated some sort of reverse proxy? In that case, do you manage the possibility of multiple clients opening a websocket connection to the same to “the same” server (which may actually be a different instance of the same proxy)

I'm CEO of Neon. Happy to answer any questions you might have.

by nikita 4y ago

I'm CEO of Neon. Happy to answer any questions you might have.

amerine 4y ago

Is your geo-distributed read replicas going to lean on WAL replication?

nikita 4y ago
Yes, we are working on this at the moment. Since we control storage we will be implementing this at the storage level. From there we are thinking to expose <project_id>.read.neon.tech and <project_id>.write.neon.tech and for read queries route traffic to the local replica. It's not set in stone yet, but that's the gist of it.
- amerine 4y ago
  Excellent. That work’s wonderfully for us too ;-)

evangow 4y ago

Any plans to introduce a way to connect to a Neon database without making it publicly accessible via the internet?

MuffinFlavored 4y ago
how would they do this? allow it to be added to a wireguard VPN or something?
- koolba 4y ago
  Or within AWS world you can do VPC peering.
  - nikita 4y ago
    How about private link?
nikita 4y ago
Yes. What's your use case? Security or egress costs (those are 0 if you are in the same region).
- evangow 4y ago
  Security
  - nikita 4y ago
    We are looking at private link for this. Will this work for you?
    - evangow 4y ago
      I haven't used PrivateLink before, but from my brief look, it looks like it would work.

r3trohack3r 4y ago

Neon looks like everything I've ever wanted out of a serverless database. I send a vendor pg compatible queries, vendor takes care of everything, charges me for usage - and connections work with 3rd party serverless runtimes. I have a number of workloads I'd migrate to you over the next few weeks if you're ready for it. What is the state of Neon? Is it ready for small-volume but business critical loads? I'm struggling to find support guarantees and SLAs on your website, do you have them yet? What is your off-site backup story? Can I export my backups to something like R2, S3, or B2? Many of my customers are running in Cloudflare Workers. Their volume is low, but it's business critical (DB downtime means business downtime - business will fail if we lose all the data).

nikita 4y ago
> I have a number of workloads I'd migrate to you over the next few weeks if you're ready for it. What is the state of Neon? Please do we will support it! We have 22K hosted databases on the platform and are quite stable. > Is it ready for small-volume but business critical loads? Depends on business criticality. But generally yes. We are debating internally when we are going to announce it. > I'm struggling to find support guarantees and SLAs on your website, do you have them yet? Good feedback. It's in the works. > What is your off-site backup story? Can I export my backups to something like R2, S3, or B2? Since our storage is integrated with s3 and supports branching we can treat branches as backups. > Many of my customers are running in Cloudflare Workers. Their volume is low, but it's business critical (DB downtime means business downtime - business will fail if we lose all the data). We haven't lost data yet. There are a lot of redundancy in the system. Safekeepers, S3, branches (backups).

slig 4y ago

Due to latency, Neon is only for AWS/GCP/Azure datacenters or can we use it from smaller providers, such as DO/Linode/etc?

nikita 4y ago
You can use in anywhere. We will keep working to drive GLOBAL latency down. As in connect to Neon from anywhere.

codegeek 4y ago

How do you compare against planetscale (I understand that they are mysql vs you postgres but I am looking for serverless db right now so business/product/support comparison is important)

manigandham 4y ago
Planetscale[1] is MySQL that is automatically sharded and proxied with a system called Vitess to scale horizontally. Because it's real MySQL, most functionality still works without the operations overhead. Neon[2] is Postgres that has a surgically enhanced data layer that reads from a distributed set of nodes and object storage, but is still a single Postgres instance that's started and stopped on-demand and not automatically sharded. Because it's real Postgres, all functionality works including extensions without dealing with issues from sharded datasets, but also without the horizontally scalability and instant start (so far). However because the data layer is improved, the actual compute node is much more efficient in both startup and processing so it works well in many scenarios. CockroachDB[3] is a proprietary distributed database built to Postgres wire/data protocol with natively separated storage and compute. Their serverless plan also starts and stops instances as traffic comes in but with fast startup because of their specific architecture. Because it's not real Postgres though, there's a good bit of missing functionality. There's also TiDB[4] from PingCap which is similar to a MySQL version of CockroachDB, and Yugabyte[5] which is somewhat like Neon but with both distributed compute and data layers also using real Postgres components - however neither has a serverless offering. 1. https://planetscale.com/ https://planetscale.com/ 2. https://neon.tech/ https://neon.tech/ 3. https://www.cockroachlabs.com/ https://www.cockroachlabs.com/ 4. https://www.pingcap.com/tidb/ https://www.pingcap.com/tidb/ 5. https://www.yugabyte.com/ https://www.yugabyte.com/
- codegeek 4y ago
  Thank you. This is helpful.

sebk 4y ago

I'm glad to have an answer to the question I asked you 7 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32472443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32472443 (What's Neon's point of view about transient state in nodes? Is there a world where serverless client connections are stateless, or is the set up overhead not expected to be worth the cost?). This is a good analysis of network time and optimization. I'd love to see a followup exploring the impact on the server side; Considering how Postgres was historically not very efficient at setting up new connections but has been steadily getting better with each major release. It would also be great to see what portion of the request is taken up by the setup versus the query itself, to have some idea of cost.

irq-1 4y ago

Why do web services not discuss the metrics that were common for cloud servers? Like average response time and distribution, throughput, error rates, etc... and what can you tell us about neon?

Normal_gaussian 4y ago

I have a non-tech business approaching limited release. I'm very interested in two things: - Data safety and privacy. As I'm UK based - can my data be restricted to the UK only (no magic round the world trips inside your backend)? do you comply with the GDPR? - Can I set up postgres (WAL) replication to a non-neon database?

sarb 4y ago

Is the websocket connection opened directly from the client to the Postgres server? Or is the other end of the websocket tunnel terminated some sort of reverse proxy? In that case, do you manage the possibility of multiple clients opening a websocket connection to the same to “the same” server (which may actually be a different instance of the same proxy)