15 ms·

Neon Serverless Postgres is generally available

324 points by refset 2y ago

AYBABTME 2y ago
Congrats on reaching GA!
rohan_ 2y ago
Given this is serverless - can this scale indefinitely? Asking both in terms of storage and compute.
- nikita 2y ago
  There are some limits. Architecture wise storage indefinitely and compute up to the largest bare metal node on Amazon plus as many read replicas as you want.
nickzelei 2y ago
Nice work Neon! I’ve used it a number of times and am impressed at how quickly databases become available. Leaps and bounds faster than RDS. it’s amazing when you need something now.
hickstoor 2y ago
Yea it’s generally available
virtuozzz 2y ago
Congrats, Neon!
khalidx 2y ago
The market timing of this ~1 day (same day?) after Supabase GA? Both are good platforms though.
- brospars 2y ago
  This cannot be a coincidence
  - sakras 2y ago
    (Neon engineer) It is a coincidence :) I had to confirm internally too.
redrove 2y ago
I’m not extremely well versed in the topic so forgive the ignorance: how does this differ from AWS Aurora’s offering? is pricing or scaling different. It’s not immediately obvious why you would want to use this instead.
- nikita 2y ago
  (Neon ceo) 1. You should try and see the experience 2. It scales to 0. If you have lots of projects aurora costs really add up 3. It supports branches and integrates with vercel. You can have environment for every dev and every pr. 4. We will be on multiple clouds soon 5. We are just getting started
  - nolok 2y ago
    Hello, not parent I wish you the best of luck, but please know that for a lot of us time is money and also literally our most invaluable / irreplaceable asset, and also tech startups who want us to make a bet on them need to have some sort of value proposition given the risk of "you might die or disapear or be aqui-hired in three months after we moved" so I would encourage to not answering this as your 1). To me the instinctive reaction is "it's for when you will have time to fool around and figure it out by yourself". It is my opinion only, it's worth nothing more than that, and I realize you didn't ask for it, but I just wanted to let you know.
    - ZeroCool2u 2y ago
      In the linked article it says: "Unlike AWS Aurora we decided to open source all the changes in Postgres and also send them upstream as well as fully open source our cloud native storage." Also, at the top right there's a link to the GitHub repo: https://github.com/neondatabase/neon https://github.com/neondatabase/neon You can find replies from folks in this thread as well discussing self hosted deployments and you can find an entire discord channel dedicated to that topic here: https://discord.gg/92vNTzKDGp https://discord.gg/92vNTzKDGp I'm not associated with Neon and I've never used it before and I certainly don't disagree with your sentiment, but it seems like Neon has gone above and beyond in making sure that workloads could continue to run in the event the company fails and broadly assuaging those concerns.
fabian2k 2y ago
I don't get how this achieves point in time recovery? I assume I'm misunderstanding some fundamental part here. If the branches are achieved using a COW file system, how does this part from the blog post work? > Suppose a developer fat fingers a table or a database out of existence? No problem, move the branch to the second before that event happened. How can I go back in time arbitrarily here? I would have assumed that you can only go to existing snapshots if the underlying method is a COW file system.
- mattashii 2y ago
  (Postgres hacker @ Neon) PostgreSQL writes changes to disk using WAL for consistency. Every WAL record is a set of changes to the PostgreSQL data directory (data files, metadata, ...) that need to be persisted together. Neon indexes this WAL, and restores pages to the right version by replaying all WAL from the previous page snapshot up to the right version, allowing full point-in-time for all persistent tables in the database.
  - leftcenterright 2y ago
    Calling it "branches" does seem misleading. For instance, would this also work across major PG versions? afaict, it is just not possible to merge two differently versioned postgres-es
    - mattashii 2y ago
      > Calling it "branches" does seem misleading. Branching in Neon should be interpreted more like the branches seen in graph theory's trees rather than the featureset exposed by git: the whole history of a Neon project is a unidirected graph with a single path between any two points in the history. > For instance, would this also work across major PG versions As for multiple major versions: We currently can handle multiple major versions in different tenants on the same pageserver/safekeeper servers, just not for the user's PostgreSQL instance. Major version upgrades (by way of pg_upgrade) are something we're working on, but that's still quite far down the road. > afaict, it is just not possible to merge two differently versioned postgres-es Correct, and AFAIK we don't actually advertise anything related to merging histories. If we do, please do tell where, so we can correct that.
sakras 2y ago
I'm an engineer at Neon, happy to answer any questions
- tristan957 2y ago
  Same here!
- leftcenterright 2y ago
  I would appreciate some details on the implementation of isolation for multi-tenancy. Are the worker nodes shared?
  - sakras 2y ago
    Sure! Each instance of Postgres runs inside a qemu VM, inside a kubernetes pod. The VM provides isolation, autoscaling, metrics, and (eventually) live migrations. These VMs share AWS Metal nodes. Source code here: https://github.com/neondatabase/autoscaling https://github.com/neondatabase/autoscaling
yawnxyz 2y ago
That pricing is quite "less generous" than Turso: https://turso.tech/pricing https://turso.tech/pricing I'm wondering what accounts for the difference; is Turso just bleeding money on smaller tiers, etc?
- johtso 2y ago
  Turso is sqlite not postgresql
  - yawnxyz 2y ago
    as a "mere user" of the JS or API endpoints, should I think one is better than the other? To me it doesn't really matter if it's Supabase/Neon, Turso, or D1 powering it as long as... it works Is this faster / more resilient?
    - djha-skin 2y ago
      I'd probably care because of the ecosystem. There's a bunch of developer tooling and mature ORMs around postgres. Granted, those same libraries/frameworks probably work with sqlite too. I guess it's just trust. I trust postgres more than I trust sqlite for building big apps. One last point: I'd look at feature set of both offerings. I suspect the features of the postgres offering to be more conducive to scale.
    - nop_slide 2y ago
      They both could be faster or more resilient depending on your workload and what you want that to mean. Take some time to learn about the differences between postgres and sqlite it is good to know about the trade offs.
    - filleokus 2y ago
      With Turso you get an sqlite database behind a SDK or an (HTTP REST) API endpoint. With Neon you get a postgresql database over a postgres wire format connection. So if you have an already existing app speaking postgres to a database somewhere, Neon is a drop-in-replacement, while Turso would require adapting to their custom API. If you are creating a new service, you might need/want to take advantage of e.g postgres extensions [0] for storing geographical data or pg_vector for similarity searches etc. Or you simply need more stringent serialisability promises than what libsql / turso can provide. But if you just writing something new from scratch and have "simple" demands, I think something like Turso looks cool (and cheap!). [0]: https://neon.tech/docs/extensions/pg-extensions https://neon.tech/docs/extensions/pg-extensions
jrklabs_com 2y ago
If you have an application that runs 24*7, how do you determine what your costs will be?
- nikita 2y ago
  (Neon ceo) They never exceed the limit you set in the number of cpus. In practice the cost a lot less than max number of cpus * time. Think about area under the curve of cpu(t).
  - jmuguy 2y ago
    Appreciate yall being active in here but this doesn't really answer the question. Neon looks really interesting to us, we're currently paying Heroku for a standard-5 postgres plan at $1400/month. But that's mostly for the 1 TB of storage, I have no idea how much "compute" we currently use.
    - nikita 2y ago
      You will likely save money on Neon. Please reach out to our team (contact sales, support or discord) and we will give you an estimate
- mj4e 2y ago
  (Neon PM) Do you have have an idea of the RAM or compute your application needs Many applications can run 24/7 with 1 GiB RAM on the Launch plan at $19/month.
- tristan957 2y ago
  Our Sales team would be happy to talk through pricing with you. Do you have any suggestions on where we could clearer to people like yourself who are in the same position? Storage costs can be calculated as something along the lines of: size of current database * retention period (configurable) + compute hours (Neon engineer)
PeterZaitsev 2y ago
Congrats! It has been quite the journey!
stemc43 2y ago
ad on hackernews?
- sgammon 2y ago
  Everyone shows off their cool work on Hckrnews
mehulashah 2y ago
Congratulations! Nice job, Neon team. The most remarkable part of the service is the forking history in storage for a database. So fun.
- nikita 2y ago
  (Neon ceo) Our storage tech is amazing :) And written in Rust for extra fun and profit
pier25 2y ago
Anyone using it in production? The only issue I've found with Neon is that to use listen/notify the DB needs to be awake 24/7 which defeats the purpose of serverless.
- mj4e 2y ago
  (Neon PM) This is true and very often production applications need access to their database 24/7, so they benefit from the serverless nature of autoscaling.
- shinypokemon 2y ago
  (Neon DevRel here) This is valid. However, many production databases won't scale to zero often. The serverless proposition is still valuable if you factor in the development, test, and staging environments scaling to zero plus our autoscaling that doesn't require downtime or dropped connections. For guaranteed message delivery, you're probably best of using a messaging system designed with that in mind instead of listen/notify.
  - pc86 2y ago
    Is it possible to set the production database to have a minimum scale of 1? So even if it "should" scale to zero it won't?
    - joshstrange 2y ago
      Yes, you can set the min/max for scale. I scale down to “.25” as my min.
jacksonhacker 2y ago
[dead]
ddorian43 2y ago
Will there be any effort to support self hosting open source (releases, docs, support?), instead of just "source code available"?
- nikita 2y ago
  Please join our discord a number of people are doing that and the community is helping out.
  - herpdyderp 2y ago
    I find it really sad how many communities these days use Discord rather than a searchable forum. There's no specific Q&A format to hone in on specific solutions.
    - tristan957 2y ago
      Especially now that Discord will be displaying ads. (Neon Engineer)
cpursley 2y ago
Cool tech aside, setting up a database in neon is just so easy. It's my default now - especially after releasing replication.
mritchie712 2y ago
Is it a coincidence supabase went GA 2 hours before this? Not being snarky, genuinely curious. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40039191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40039191
- nikita 2y ago
  Yes :)
- kelvich 2y ago
  To provide more context, our original plan was to launch the GA on March 22nd. However, we decided to move the date to April 15th because a few projects required additional time to complete. Last week we saw Supabase announcement but we didn't know what is that about and decided to not to move our date again.
  - k8sToGo 2y ago
    Who is “we”? Who are you? Your HN profile doesn’t tell.
    - mattashii 2y ago
      (PG Hacker @ Neon) Stas Kelvich one of my bosses, and one of the founders of Neon.
bilalq 2y ago
Storage is the most surprisingly expensive part now. $1.50/GB is kind of a tough pill to swallow. We've been exploring the idea of shifting from Aurora to Neon. With the recent pricing changes, our bill has exploded even with almost zero usage of compute time.
- nikita 2y ago
  We are currently lumping storage retention history (we store all the history for a period of time so you can time travel) and backups together. We are rethinking this, please stay tuned
  - bilalq 2y ago
    Even if backups/history were taking up zero space, $1.50/GB seems really high for raw storage. The rest of the pricing seems reasonable to me. We're only around 100GB right now, but can see that ballooning up in the future and raising some concerns. By the way, I do want to say that branching is a game changer. The recent usability improvements like graphs/metrics and being able to reset a branch to the state of another one without affecting the endpoint is so nice. We previously had a messy script that took care of creating a new branch, moving endpoints, renaming, deleting, etc. More fine-grained permissions for users on projects would be my number one ask at this point, but overall, I really appreciate the improvements the Neon team has made in recent months.
    - throwaway5959 2y ago
      I’m confused, are we talking about object storage here? Like $0.023/GB in S3 storage cost?
      - est31 2y ago
        Neon keeps an NVME cache in the Pageservers, and it also keeps copies of the data in S3, one for the main storage, and one for the backup case. The data also gets stored on special replicated storage (Safekeepers). So it might be in 6 different places at the same time (3 safekeepers, 1 pageserver, 2 S3 buckets), details depending on the data's lifecycle through the system. This architecture delivers really good safety: Once your transaction commits, the data is already replicated across different AZs, and this is done without there being an S3 request each time. It also means that Neon can deliver features like branching. (Neon engineer)
ahmadrosid 2y ago
I've been using Neon's serverless Postgres for the last 6 months and I'm extremely impressed! As a developer, it has been a game-changer in terms of productivity and letting me focus on building features rather than managing database infrastructure. Congrats to the amazing Neon team on launching serverless Postgres to the world!
- clarkbw 2y ago
  Thank you! Can you tell me more about the stack you're using? [pure curiosity] (neon product)
t1c 2y ago
I tried Neon a few months ago when attempting to switch away from a self hosted db. It was a horrible experience, customer support was unhelpful, it was glitchy, slow, and laggy, and even before the price increase their pricing was way too high.
- compootr 2y ago
  adding on, didn't they also hide the percentages from their status page because it was going down so much?
  - tristan957 2y ago
    We did not hide it because it was going down. We hid it because it was an incorrect calculation. We are currently re-doing the our status page to look more like Snowflake's. I don't have any proof, but you'll just have to trust me, which could be a tough ask. Neon really tries to be transparent in internal and external communication. (Neon engineer)
- clarkbw 2y ago
  woof, that does not sound good. Can you say more about how you were connecting? What was slow / gitchy and laggy? Feel free to reach to over DM to me with your project details. (neon empl)
  - codetrotter 2y ago
    > Feel free to reach to over DM to me with your project details. I’m not the parent commenter but just giving you a heads up that your HN profile doesn’t list any socials so I don’t know if people will find how to DM you. Unless you guys have a public Discord or something and it’s implied that that is how people would be able to DM you.
    - clarkbw 2y ago
      TY, fixed. Neon does have a public Discord https://discord.gg/92vNTzKDGp https://discord.gg/92vNTzKDGp
c-fe 2y ago
I have used Cloudflare D1 before - how does Neon compare to D1?
- cpursley 2y ago
  Is D1 Postgres?
  - c-fe 2y ago
    good point - yeah D1 i think is sqlite based. for my toy projects that hasnt mattered so far but for more complex projects i see how this is a big difference, thanks for pointing out!
    - sgammon 2y ago
      Personally I find D1 to be fantastic (and comparable, in this case), but that's just me
  - sgammon 2y ago
    D1 is sqlite but it's serverless, so the two are comparable on that basis
pc86 2y ago
It looks like the compute for the free tier is free (for your main branch) + 20h for branches, but the lowest paid tier is 300h for all branches. Can anyone using this speak to that? I've seen this trend where free tier has better features than the lowest paid tier. Edit: Love to see several Neon folks in this thread from various parts of the company. It's always good to get insight from engineering, devrel, product, and CEO.
- mj4e 2y ago
  (Neon PM) If your project uses less than 500 MiB storage, our Free plan might be the best plan for you. If your project needs more storage, branches or larger compute then a paid plan might be a better fit: with Launch you can run your project 24/7 at $19/month.
  - pc86 2y ago
    Thanks! So that 300h of compute is for other branches? Still 24/7 for primary compute on Launch?
    - mj4e 2y ago
      The Launch plan includes 300 compute hours. All your computes draw from this, regardless of whether or not it's a primary branch. For a simple comparison, let's assume you only use 0.25 vCPU computes and your primary compute runs 24/7 (~750 hours per month) to keep the comparison easy: 1. On the Free plan, you can have the primary running 24/7 plus an additional 20 hours for other branches. 2. On the Launch plan, you can have the primary running 24/7 plus an additional 450 hours for other branches. And of course the 10 GiB storage + other paid features. Full details at https://neon.tech/docs/introduction/plans https://neon.tech/docs/introduction/plans
joshstrange 2y ago
I switched my company over to Neon from PlanetScale. In part for the ability to scale up/down easily and also so I could run multiple databases on the same cluster. I also looked at (and spun up) RDS but Neon was way easier to work with and scales to 0 (Aurora Serverless is trash IMHO). Neon starts very quickly as well (hundreds of milliseconds in my testing) which is pretty awesome.
- ksec 2y ago
  Why switch away from PlanetScale though?
  - joshstrange 2y ago
    1 "Database" = 1 Server/Cluster I have 1 database per client and their needs almost never overlap so I wanted to share the underlying server/cluster between them. You can't do that on PlanetScale. Aside from that I liked working them.
- dewey 2y ago
  Switching over a company, and especially the database, to a beta product that was not public yet…that‘s brave.
  - joshstrange 2y ago
    That's fair. It was something I was worried about but I knew the worst-case was I could spin up RDS and move over to that. This is for my personal company and the load on the software is very spiky with long periods of near-zero activity (we did the switch over in one of those zero-activity periods). That gave us an easy on-ramp to testing this DB as a replacement.
  - r3trohack3r 2y ago
    Not OP, but I did the same. I have nightly backups dumped to Cloudflare R2 from a GitHub action. If Neon announces they're shutting down, migrating the database to another provider is a bash 1 liner and an hour of downtime. If Neon just "goes dark" I can recover from the nightly backup and lose at most 24 hours of data - data that is denormalized into other systems and can be manually recovered if absolutely necessary (but probably not). Not every company is the same, but for many use cases the database layer is an inconsequential decision as long as the API is fungible for your use case. Not every decision is a 1-way door. The most important way you can spend your time when making a 1-way door decision for a company isn't picking the right door. It's turning the decision into a 2-way door.
mrozbarry 2y ago
I'm working with a client on a greenfield project and I picked postgres as the tech stack. For the staging server, I just locally installed postgres, configured it, and it works perfectly fine. On the flip side, I'd rather just focus on code, and if there's a free tier (which neon has), I'd rather shell that off to a service. So, my question is, what trade offs am I making other than a persistant/local db to off-site (ie probably a degree of speed). Since it's free, does that mean my data might be inspected? I'm under an NDA, and my client would prefer his data stays in-house unless there's a good reason for it not to be.
- tristan957 2y ago
  We do not inspect user data. We don't even connect to user databases, unless given permission to. You can read our privacy policy here: https://neon.tech/privacy-policy https://neon.tech/privacy-policy. Neon will never be as fast as a database local on your computer, but performance is always something we are paying attention to.
  - devjab 2y ago
    If you’re aiming for EU compliance you’re going to need to host the data within the EU and only have EU staff have any sort of access, like running support on it. Microsoft is exempt from that last bit for some reason, but they are Microsoft so they probably cheat. Won’t be a lot of EU enterprise that will be capable of using your services without rather strict compliance. Which may or may not be in your interest but you might as well just be up front about it. With the way EU is heading in regards to data protection it may not just be enterprise organisations either by 2025. Those compliance laws are getting stricter and stricter by the day.
    - tristan957 2y ago
      We support EU regions. Our sales team is happy to talk more about our data compliance.
- mbil 2y ago
  The free tier gets spun down to idle after five minutes of inactivity. The first request after that usually fails to connect as it takes a few seconds for it to come back up.
sgammon 2y ago
I tried Neon for our startup but ended up going with Planetscale. The stability guarantees seemed weak and still scare me. I would be happy to take another look, but I've had no problems with Vitess, it has been a dream. congrats on your guys' launch to GA.
- tristan957 2y ago
  I don't really see a reason to move off of Planetscale, which is a very mature offering, if it works for you. There is always a cost when moving Postgres providers, doubly so, when you're moving from MySQL to Postgres. I think the Postgres ecosystem has many differentiating factors where MySQL and MariaDB just can't compete. (Neon engineer)
bittermandel 2y ago
We're self-hosting Neon with an internal Kubernetes operator (keep your eyes out for more info) and we're incredibly happy with Neon's technical solutions. I'm not sure we'd be able to build our company without it :o
- clarkbw 2y ago
  i'd love to learn more about what you're doing! if you haven't already, please send a message. definitely want to hear lessons learned with your k8s operator.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- andix 2y ago
  What's your added value in comparison to using plain Postgres, for example with the CloudnativePG operator for k8s?
  - bittermandel 2y ago
    The by far biggest is being able to scale it on top of Ceph, while getting performance from NVMe disks on Pageservers. This enables us to increase efficiency (aka cut costs) by 90%+ in a multi-tenant environment. Of course we don't get the same out of the box experience as CNPG, but considering we have the engineering capacity to build those parts ourselves, it was a no-brainer!
    - andix 2y ago
      Thanks for the explanation! This sounds like the right use case to use something more complex. I’m always hesitant to add additional technology to the stack if it doesn’t provide a bullet proof benefit. A lot of use cases are perfectly fine with plain postgres, and I’m always fighting against polluting the stack with additional unneeded complexity.
    - leftcenterright 2y ago
      Sounds like a good use case. Do you have any benchmarks or numbers which you could share regarding the performance of database? (especially disk writes and reads)
ametrau 2y ago
How many of these comments are sock puppets?
- clarkbw 2y ago
  42
hhh 2y ago
I have been using Neon for some time now, and have quite liked it.
ashutoshw3 2y ago
[dead]
- coreyward 2y ago
  Either you don’t really rely on your DB or you don’t have monitoring in place. https://x.com/coreyward/status/1734647763151851878 https://x.com/coreyward/status/1734647763151851878
aargh_aargh 2y ago
Reading the pitch and this solves all of the problems I don't have (as a developer and operator of services that don't need to scale to millions of users). How often do you need to clone/restore whole databases, really? But I may be misunderstanding the pitch.
- mj4e 2y ago
  (Neon PM) instant branching in a development workflow because it's like git but for your database. You can develop or test against an exact copy of production without the risks of testing on production. Autoscaling is useful if the load on your datbase varies (you can save money, even if your app isn't serving millions of users).
  - figassis 2y ago
    Until you start firing emails and texts to your production customers :-) That aside, I think Neon is pretty cool. I will wait some time to see how stable a service it is, whether price hikes happen often, or whether VC money destroys it. I think Autora for me is too pricey, but I settled for self hosting PG on Hetzner. I'm there bc Hetzner has been stable for me for years. What I fear the most is having to migrate a db off of some service bc I stopped being their target audience. I know this sucks for startups trying to make it but a risk is a risk. I'll wait and see.
  - neeleshs 2y ago
    This is very cool for troubleshooting in production. Testing/developing against a production copy is a no-no, if I'm hosting my customer's data.
doublerabbit 2y ago
> Postgres continues to hold its position as one of the most popular developer databases ever created. Not bashing Postgres, however that statement is an overstatement. Postgres was a "it exists" database back in the early 2000's. All the scripts my scripts kiddie paws could get on were always orientated towards MySQL. Uploading .php3 files on 56k were my teenagers eyes of fun.
- makoz 2y ago
  Disclaimer work at AWS. > Postgres was a "it exists" database back in the early 2000's. If we're really nitpicking it's not saying Postgres is the most popular database since the early 2000's. If you base it of off install counts as the metric, I would assume the statement is true since I'd think it's either Postgres or MySQL today.
  - doublerabbit 2y ago
    I'm glad that Postgres is now a thing and is now being offered in comparison to MySQL. The stack of LAMP in 05's is what kept it down below. LAPP wasn't a thing, which is now. And Apache is falling behind thanks to nginx. It wasn't until JSON and Postgres supporting JSON that made developers change their cog. 2012, and I'd agree. https://www.crunchydata.com/blog/when-did-postgres-become-cool https://www.crunchydata.com/blog/when-did-postgres-become-co... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37066292 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37066292
    - tristan957 2y ago
      I think the real turning point was the introduction of Postgres extension in 9.1 (2011).
nottorp 2y ago
What's a serverless postgres? Does it mean a postgres server hosted by Neon and you basically pay them for administration?
- letmeinhere 2y ago
  I think it usually means that it's fully queryable by serverless functions, usually via atomic HTTP API calls, and often without network restrictions.
  - letmeinhere 2y ago
    But in this case it seems to be referring to the database itself, and the ability to scale to and from zero resources on demand.
- tristan957 2y ago
  Neon is a managed serverless Postgres offering. "Managed" means we take care of Postgres administration. "Serverless" means that your database isn't running if you're not using it. We put computes to sleep after a certain amount of time. We can also scale database resources up and down as needed. (Neon engineer)
smallshen 2y ago
Is it possible to self host neon? any docs related to that?
- tristan957 2y ago
  We have a few people self-hosting Neon in this thread who are in our Discord's selfhost channel. Might try jumping in. We don't have too many docs related to self hosting at the moment.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
notamy 2y ago
Why is storage priced so high? Depending on the plan it looks like it can cost anywhere from $1.50 to $1.75 per GB. That feels pretty excessive; maybe I’m missing something that causes it to be so pricy? It actively discourages me from wanting to use it for a hobby project, because the storage costs would send my bill to over $100/month before I even use any compute.
- tristan957 2y ago
  Storage costs are something we are going to be looking at soon. If we can reduce our cost of goods sold, it is possible to pass on savings to consumers.
  - coreyward 2y ago
    You just 10x-ed the prices for storage a couple months ago.
amluto 2y ago
Have you considered publishing pricing for larger databases? It would be interesting to know whether the offering would be useful at sizes not covered by the listed tiers. edit: given the headline feature of infinite PITR capability, knowing the price tag could be quite important. Especially if purging old data isn’t supported (is it?)
- tristan957 2y ago
  Our Sales team is more than happy to communicate about custom deals. I don't know if our team has given thought about more plans on the web page. I would think we want to keep the number of plans small to give users an easier time parsing the page. I think competitors typically have similar number of plans, but I haven't checked in a while.
  - amluto 2y ago
    Aha, I see the $15 per 10 GiB/mo extra in the little info box. That’s … steep, especially for cold data. I have an application on MySQL that I’d love to move to a service like Neon. Maybe I’ll port it to Postgres some day. But not at those storage prices, at least not without serious care.
clarkbw 2y ago
(neon product) hey all, i've only been with neon for a very short time but i'm super excited to be here because i believe neon can deliver an amazing developer experience that databases have been lacking. while we are simply postgres on top the neon platform is something special that unlocks a lot of new possibilities. this ga is simply marking readiness for the platform and the team that has been building it. there's a lot more to do going forward. as we're looking forward, post-GA, i'd love to hear what you think neon needs to focus on next. here's what i'm seeing so far: - improved gh actions integration - more extensions - better developer extension support - autoscaling communications - metrics / logs integrations what else?
- tristan957 2y ago
  Bryan has great ideas, so stay tuned for more product features soon. (Neon engineer)
CuriouslyC 2y ago
Neat idea, but the stability and assurance of RDS is pretty compelling and migrating databases is pretty much the worst in my experience, even big services like Azure can have unexpected database issues that burn time and money. Also, custom postgres implementations are a bit scary from a performance tuning perspective.
gritzko 2y ago
The feature they call "branches" is more accurately to call "snapshots" or "checkpoints". Creating CoW writable versions and rolling back to past versions - that's snapshots. Branches imply merging, which is a huuuge can of worms, even if we apply last-write-wins, cause referential integrity and things, can't just merge postgreses.
- nikita 2y ago
  Merging is a tricky one for operational databases. We think merging schemas is a useful feature. Merging data is likely not. The feature is coming!
anentropic 2y ago
This looks awesome (wish I had these features for MySQL on my current project...) Are there any resources for IaC, e.g. terraform provider etc?
- clarkbw 2y ago
  Yes, we have great APIs ( https://neon.tech/docs/reference/api-reference https://neon.tech/docs/reference/api-reference ) and a Terraform provider ( https://registry.terraform.io/providers/terraform-community-providers/neon/latest/docs https://registry.terraform.io/providers/terraform-community-... )
ForHackernews 2y ago
Is this actually Postgres, or is it some other database that aims to be compatible with the PG wire protocol?
- mj4e 2y ago
  It’s Postgres.
- tristan957 2y ago
  Our fork of Postgres is located at https://github.com/neondatabase/postgres https://github.com/neondatabase/postgres.
continuational 2y ago
Branching the whole database (data included) seems really great. Congrats! It does seem a bit pricey though. For $69/month (Scale), I could rent a dedicated server with 8 dedicated CPUs, twice the RAM and 20x the storage (and that's physically attached NVMe in raid 1), and have money to spare: https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ax/ https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ax/
- shinypokemon 2y ago
  (Neon DevRel) By all means, self-host Neon and come talk about it in our Discord (https://neon.tech/discord https://neon.tech/discord)! Cheeky jokes aside, you can definitely go down the hetzner/VPS route. Not everyone has the expertise or desire to spend time doing so, but if you do, then go for it I say. We have some nifty features that are non-trivial to recreate, but again, it depends on your needs.
- dustyduster 2y ago
  $69/month is peanuts for anyone running something that hopes to make any amount of money. Developer and operational experience, uptime, etc. seem way more important. Just getting to skip dealing with all that nonsense and focus on whether your idea / startup has any value whatsoever seems far more important. (Obviously if it's just like a hobby deal then run it on a cheap VPS).
- hamandcheese 2y ago
  Unless it's enough money to spare to pay someone to manage Postgres on the server and scale it up and down as needed, this isn't that useful a comparison. As an avid self-hoster, by all means, self host Postgres! But self hosted Postgres is not the same product as managed Postgres.
- riku_iki 2y ago
  > For $69/month (Scale) this also doesn't cover 100% uptime, but only 300h, and you will pay extra for each extra hour.
  - 2y ago
indymike 2y ago
The name Neon is very confusing as KDE uses that name for it's Linux Distribution and has for quite some time (at least 2017).
tasubotadas 2y ago
How it compares against supabase?
amanda99 2y ago
Does it support extensions like PostGIS?
- sakras 2y ago
  Yes! We support a lot of extensions, including PostGIS. Full list here: https://neon.tech/docs/extensions/pg-extensions https://neon.tech/docs/extensions/pg-extensions
WuxiFingerHold 2y ago
As far as I know Neon has no filesystem cache, which is the most important performance enhancer for Postgres. As here are many using Neon already in production: Does anyone can comment on the performance for large databases (a couple of tables with around 100 million rows) compared to RDS / Supabase / other hosted service? I can imagine that it is substantially slower. But would be happy to be surprised, if not. Or to learn how Neon compensates the missing filesystem cache.
- sakras 2y ago
  Neon engineer here. We implemented our own local cache between the pageserver and Postgres (called LFC). It compensates for the lack of a normal file system cache, and scales up with the rest of the autoscaling infrastructure.
jpdb 2y ago
Neon seems really great to me, but I wish I could easily run it locally via Kubernetes. I know there are some projects out there[0] but they are all supported by 3rd parties and things like branching and other features don't appear to be supported. I'd love to be able to just use a helm chart to have Neon in my homelab. [0] https://github.com/itsbalamurali/neon-operator https://github.com/itsbalamurali/neon-operator
kingspact 2y ago
How can you have an SQL database without a server? Do they just mean container-on-demand?
- tristan957 2y ago
  We spawn a Postgres instance on the fly if it isn't already up in just a few hundred milliseconds. Cold start times are always something we try to improve. (Neon engineer)
  - kingspact 2y ago
    A process? Or like a container with Postgres in it?
    - tristan957 2y ago
      It is a VM which is hosted in a Kubernetes pod.
      - kingspact 2y ago
        We just run everything on a small cheap Threadripper with a mere 1/2TB RAM, it just sits in the co-founder's basement.
estebarb 2y ago
The technology is interesting but the billing doesn't convince me. I don't feel that I can scale storage easier with Neon than using just a bigger server with plain Postgresql.
- tristan957 2y ago
  Neon is more than just Postgres with a storage device. It's a managed service with features like branching, autoscaling, bottomless storage, etc. People who really find Neon valuable usually partake in our "differentiating" features, so if all you need is a managed Postgres, there will definitely be more competitive prices out on the market.
vendiddy 2y ago
I want to use this as a chance to bring attention to a GitHub issue that I think would help reduce friction for Neon: https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/issues/4989 https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/issues/4989 If the Neon driver were to allow us to easily pass in a localhost connection, the development and test experience would be easier. Perhaps Neon could swap to something like this internally: https://github.com/porsager/postgres https://github.com/porsager/postgres. Having run a local dev environment connected to Neon and tests connected to Neon got in our way of adoption. We'd prefer to develop and run tests against a regular Postgres localhost database. To the PMs of Neon, put yourself in the shoes of a new developer thinking of giving Neon a try. What changes will I have to make to my code and my development workflow?
algernonramone 2y ago
[flagged]
lrsdfnbhof 2y ago
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golondon 2y ago
Do I still need to worry about vacuum and bloat or does Neon intelligently handle these?
coreyward 2y ago
I doubt I’ll ever use Neon again after they had our production database go down several times over just a couple of months Q4 last year. We got tired of the downtime during an incident and we were able to spin up a Supabase PG instance and switch over to it faster than Neon could resolve the incident. It wound up taking them days to resolve it fully. They then increased the prices significantly about a month later. Given that it’s only been four months since these issues, I don’t think that they are serious people in the slightest and don’t trust them with a production database.
- nikita 2y ago
  (Neon CEO) I'm sorry you had this experience. We had several instabilities in Q4 as the system became popular. That was the one of the reasons we called it "preview" until we got stability to where it needs to be. We are also very transparent about every outage - see neonstatus.com and highlight even the smallest ones. We are also iterating over prices - we were purely consumption before and realized that we need to offer $19 pain plan to start based on the value our customers get. This is in line for what other devplatform charge for using their services.
ArboretumGuy 2y ago
Congrats to Neon on the generally available status. Big vote of confidence. I've looked around and Neon is the only serverless Postgres I’ve seen that provides copy-on-write branching. Every other managed service has some significant seeding limitation when one looks at the details.
youngjake992 2y ago
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youngjake992 2y ago
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324 points by refset 2y ago

AYBABTME 2y ago

Congrats on reaching GA!

rohan_ 2y ago

Given this is serverless - can this scale indefinitely? Asking both in terms of storage and compute.

nikita 2y ago
There are some limits. Architecture wise storage indefinitely and compute up to the largest bare metal node on Amazon plus as many read replicas as you want.

nickzelei 2y ago

Nice work Neon! I’ve used it a number of times and am impressed at how quickly databases become available. Leaps and bounds faster than RDS. it’s amazing when you need something now.

hickstoor 2y ago

Yea it’s generally available

virtuozzz 2y ago

Congrats, Neon!

khalidx 2y ago

The market timing of this ~1 day (same day?) after Supabase GA? Both are good platforms though.

brospars 2y ago
This cannot be a coincidence
- sakras 2y ago
  (Neon engineer) It is a coincidence :) I had to confirm internally too.

redrove 2y ago

I’m not extremely well versed in the topic so forgive the ignorance: how does this differ from AWS Aurora’s offering? is pricing or scaling different. It’s not immediately obvious why you would want to use this instead.

nikita 2y ago
(Neon ceo) 1. You should try and see the experience 2. It scales to 0. If you have lots of projects aurora costs really add up 3. It supports branches and integrates with vercel. You can have environment for every dev and every pr. 4. We will be on multiple clouds soon 5. We are just getting started
- nolok 2y ago
  Hello, not parent I wish you the best of luck, but please know that for a lot of us time is money and also literally our most invaluable / irreplaceable asset, and also tech startups who want us to make a bet on them need to have some sort of value proposition given the risk of "you might die or disapear or be aqui-hired in three months after we moved" so I would encourage to not answering this as your 1). To me the instinctive reaction is "it's for when you will have time to fool around and figure it out by yourself". It is my opinion only, it's worth nothing more than that, and I realize you didn't ask for it, but I just wanted to let you know.
  - ZeroCool2u 2y ago
    In the linked article it says: "Unlike AWS Aurora we decided to open source all the changes in Postgres and also send them upstream as well as fully open source our cloud native storage." Also, at the top right there's a link to the GitHub repo: https://github.com/neondatabase/neon https://github.com/neondatabase/neon You can find replies from folks in this thread as well discussing self hosted deployments and you can find an entire discord channel dedicated to that topic here: https://discord.gg/92vNTzKDGp https://discord.gg/92vNTzKDGp I'm not associated with Neon and I've never used it before and I certainly don't disagree with your sentiment, but it seems like Neon has gone above and beyond in making sure that workloads could continue to run in the event the company fails and broadly assuaging those concerns.

fabian2k 2y ago

I don't get how this achieves point in time recovery? I assume I'm misunderstanding some fundamental part here. If the branches are achieved using a COW file system, how does this part from the blog post work? > Suppose a developer fat fingers a table or a database out of existence? No problem, move the branch to the second before that event happened. How can I go back in time arbitrarily here? I would have assumed that you can only go to existing snapshots if the underlying method is a COW file system.

mattashii 2y ago
(Postgres hacker @ Neon) PostgreSQL writes changes to disk using WAL for consistency. Every WAL record is a set of changes to the PostgreSQL data directory (data files, metadata, ...) that need to be persisted together. Neon indexes this WAL, and restores pages to the right version by replaying all WAL from the previous page snapshot up to the right version, allowing full point-in-time for all persistent tables in the database.
- leftcenterright 2y ago
  Calling it "branches" does seem misleading. For instance, would this also work across major PG versions? afaict, it is just not possible to merge two differently versioned postgres-es
  - mattashii 2y ago
    > Calling it "branches" does seem misleading. Branching in Neon should be interpreted more like the branches seen in graph theory's trees rather than the featureset exposed by git: the whole history of a Neon project is a unidirected graph with a single path between any two points in the history. > For instance, would this also work across major PG versions As for multiple major versions: We currently can handle multiple major versions in different tenants on the same pageserver/safekeeper servers, just not for the user's PostgreSQL instance. Major version upgrades (by way of pg_upgrade) are something we're working on, but that's still quite far down the road. > afaict, it is just not possible to merge two differently versioned postgres-es Correct, and AFAIK we don't actually advertise anything related to merging histories. If we do, please do tell where, so we can correct that.

sakras 2y ago

I'm an engineer at Neon, happy to answer any questions

tristan957 2y ago
Same here!
leftcenterright 2y ago
I would appreciate some details on the implementation of isolation for multi-tenancy. Are the worker nodes shared?
- sakras 2y ago
  Sure! Each instance of Postgres runs inside a qemu VM, inside a kubernetes pod. The VM provides isolation, autoscaling, metrics, and (eventually) live migrations. These VMs share AWS Metal nodes. Source code here: https://github.com/neondatabase/autoscaling https://github.com/neondatabase/autoscaling

yawnxyz 2y ago

That pricing is quite "less generous" than Turso: https://turso.tech/pricing https://turso.tech/pricing I'm wondering what accounts for the difference; is Turso just bleeding money on smaller tiers, etc?

johtso 2y ago
Turso is sqlite not postgresql
- yawnxyz 2y ago
  as a "mere user" of the JS or API endpoints, should I think one is better than the other? To me it doesn't really matter if it's Supabase/Neon, Turso, or D1 powering it as long as... it works Is this faster / more resilient?
  - djha-skin 2y ago
    I'd probably care because of the ecosystem. There's a bunch of developer tooling and mature ORMs around postgres. Granted, those same libraries/frameworks probably work with sqlite too. I guess it's just trust. I trust postgres more than I trust sqlite for building big apps. One last point: I'd look at feature set of both offerings. I suspect the features of the postgres offering to be more conducive to scale.
  - nop_slide 2y ago
    They both could be faster or more resilient depending on your workload and what you want that to mean. Take some time to learn about the differences between postgres and sqlite it is good to know about the trade offs.
  - filleokus 2y ago
    With Turso you get an sqlite database behind a SDK or an (HTTP REST) API endpoint. With Neon you get a postgresql database over a postgres wire format connection. So if you have an already existing app speaking postgres to a database somewhere, Neon is a drop-in-replacement, while Turso would require adapting to their custom API. If you are creating a new service, you might need/want to take advantage of e.g postgres extensions [0] for storing geographical data or pg_vector for similarity searches etc. Or you simply need more stringent serialisability promises than what libsql / turso can provide. But if you just writing something new from scratch and have "simple" demands, I think something like Turso looks cool (and cheap!). [0]: https://neon.tech/docs/extensions/pg-extensions https://neon.tech/docs/extensions/pg-extensions

jrklabs_com 2y ago

If you have an application that runs 24*7, how do you determine what your costs will be?

nikita 2y ago
(Neon ceo) They never exceed the limit you set in the number of cpus. In practice the cost a lot less than max number of cpus * time. Think about area under the curve of cpu(t).
- jmuguy 2y ago
  Appreciate yall being active in here but this doesn't really answer the question. Neon looks really interesting to us, we're currently paying Heroku for a standard-5 postgres plan at $1400/month. But that's mostly for the 1 TB of storage, I have no idea how much "compute" we currently use.
  - nikita 2y ago
    You will likely save money on Neon. Please reach out to our team (contact sales, support or discord) and we will give you an estimate
mj4e 2y ago
(Neon PM) Do you have have an idea of the RAM or compute your application needs Many applications can run 24/7 with 1 GiB RAM on the Launch plan at $19/month.
tristan957 2y ago
Our Sales team would be happy to talk through pricing with you. Do you have any suggestions on where we could clearer to people like yourself who are in the same position? Storage costs can be calculated as something along the lines of: size of current database * retention period (configurable) + compute hours (Neon engineer)

PeterZaitsev 2y ago

Congrats! It has been quite the journey!

stemc43 2y ago

ad on hackernews?

sgammon 2y ago
Everyone shows off their cool work on Hckrnews

mehulashah 2y ago

Congratulations! Nice job, Neon team. The most remarkable part of the service is the forking history in storage for a database. So fun.

nikita 2y ago
(Neon ceo) Our storage tech is amazing :) And written in Rust for extra fun and profit

pier25 2y ago

Anyone using it in production? The only issue I've found with Neon is that to use listen/notify the DB needs to be awake 24/7 which defeats the purpose of serverless.

mj4e 2y ago
(Neon PM) This is true and very often production applications need access to their database 24/7, so they benefit from the serverless nature of autoscaling.
shinypokemon 2y ago
(Neon DevRel here) This is valid. However, many production databases won't scale to zero often. The serverless proposition is still valuable if you factor in the development, test, and staging environments scaling to zero plus our autoscaling that doesn't require downtime or dropped connections. For guaranteed message delivery, you're probably best of using a messaging system designed with that in mind instead of listen/notify.
- pc86 2y ago
  Is it possible to set the production database to have a minimum scale of 1? So even if it "should" scale to zero it won't?
  - joshstrange 2y ago
    Yes, you can set the min/max for scale. I scale down to “.25” as my min.

jacksonhacker 2y ago

[dead]

ddorian43 2y ago

Will there be any effort to support self hosting open source (releases, docs, support?), instead of just "source code available"?

nikita 2y ago
Please join our discord a number of people are doing that and the community is helping out.
- herpdyderp 2y ago
  I find it really sad how many communities these days use Discord rather than a searchable forum. There's no specific Q&A format to hone in on specific solutions.
  - tristan957 2y ago
    Especially now that Discord will be displaying ads. (Neon Engineer)

cpursley 2y ago

Cool tech aside, setting up a database in neon is just so easy. It's my default now - especially after releasing replication.

mritchie712 2y ago

Is it a coincidence supabase went GA 2 hours before this? Not being snarky, genuinely curious. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40039191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40039191

nikita 2y ago
Yes :)
kelvich 2y ago
To provide more context, our original plan was to launch the GA on March 22nd. However, we decided to move the date to April 15th because a few projects required additional time to complete. Last week we saw Supabase announcement but we didn't know what is that about and decided to not to move our date again.
- k8sToGo 2y ago
  Who is “we”? Who are you? Your HN profile doesn’t tell.
  - mattashii 2y ago
    (PG Hacker @ Neon) Stas Kelvich one of my bosses, and one of the founders of Neon.

bilalq 2y ago

Storage is the most surprisingly expensive part now. $1.50/GB is kind of a tough pill to swallow. We've been exploring the idea of shifting from Aurora to Neon. With the recent pricing changes, our bill has exploded even with almost zero usage of compute time.

nikita 2y ago
We are currently lumping storage retention history (we store all the history for a period of time so you can time travel) and backups together. We are rethinking this, please stay tuned
- bilalq 2y ago
  Even if backups/history were taking up zero space, $1.50/GB seems really high for raw storage. The rest of the pricing seems reasonable to me. We're only around 100GB right now, but can see that ballooning up in the future and raising some concerns. By the way, I do want to say that branching is a game changer. The recent usability improvements like graphs/metrics and being able to reset a branch to the state of another one without affecting the endpoint is so nice. We previously had a messy script that took care of creating a new branch, moving endpoints, renaming, deleting, etc. More fine-grained permissions for users on projects would be my number one ask at this point, but overall, I really appreciate the improvements the Neon team has made in recent months.
  - throwaway5959 2y ago
    I’m confused, are we talking about object storage here? Like $0.023/GB in S3 storage cost?
    - est31 2y ago
      Neon keeps an NVME cache in the Pageservers, and it also keeps copies of the data in S3, one for the main storage, and one for the backup case. The data also gets stored on special replicated storage (Safekeepers). So it might be in 6 different places at the same time (3 safekeepers, 1 pageserver, 2 S3 buckets), details depending on the data's lifecycle through the system. This architecture delivers really good safety: Once your transaction commits, the data is already replicated across different AZs, and this is done without there being an S3 request each time. It also means that Neon can deliver features like branching. (Neon engineer)

ahmadrosid 2y ago

I've been using Neon's serverless Postgres for the last 6 months and I'm extremely impressed! As a developer, it has been a game-changer in terms of productivity and letting me focus on building features rather than managing database infrastructure. Congrats to the amazing Neon team on launching serverless Postgres to the world!

clarkbw 2y ago
Thank you! Can you tell me more about the stack you're using? [pure curiosity] (neon product)

t1c 2y ago

I tried Neon a few months ago when attempting to switch away from a self hosted db. It was a horrible experience, customer support was unhelpful, it was glitchy, slow, and laggy, and even before the price increase their pricing was way too high.

compootr 2y ago
adding on, didn't they also hide the percentages from their status page because it was going down so much?
- tristan957 2y ago
  We did not hide it because it was going down. We hid it because it was an incorrect calculation. We are currently re-doing the our status page to look more like Snowflake's. I don't have any proof, but you'll just have to trust me, which could be a tough ask. Neon really tries to be transparent in internal and external communication. (Neon engineer)
clarkbw 2y ago
woof, that does not sound good. Can you say more about how you were connecting? What was slow / gitchy and laggy? Feel free to reach to over DM to me with your project details. (neon empl)
- codetrotter 2y ago
  > Feel free to reach to over DM to me with your project details. I’m not the parent commenter but just giving you a heads up that your HN profile doesn’t list any socials so I don’t know if people will find how to DM you. Unless you guys have a public Discord or something and it’s implied that that is how people would be able to DM you.
  - clarkbw 2y ago
    TY, fixed. Neon does have a public Discord https://discord.gg/92vNTzKDGp https://discord.gg/92vNTzKDGp

c-fe 2y ago

I have used Cloudflare D1 before - how does Neon compare to D1?

cpursley 2y ago
Is D1 Postgres?
- c-fe 2y ago
  good point - yeah D1 i think is sqlite based. for my toy projects that hasnt mattered so far but for more complex projects i see how this is a big difference, thanks for pointing out!
  - sgammon 2y ago
    Personally I find D1 to be fantastic (and comparable, in this case), but that's just me
- sgammon 2y ago
  D1 is sqlite but it's serverless, so the two are comparable on that basis

pc86 2y ago

It looks like the compute for the free tier is free (for your main branch) + 20h for branches, but the lowest paid tier is 300h for all branches. Can anyone using this speak to that? I've seen this trend where free tier has better features than the lowest paid tier. Edit: Love to see several Neon folks in this thread from various parts of the company. It's always good to get insight from engineering, devrel, product, and CEO.

mj4e 2y ago
(Neon PM) If your project uses less than 500 MiB storage, our Free plan might be the best plan for you. If your project needs more storage, branches or larger compute then a paid plan might be a better fit: with Launch you can run your project 24/7 at $19/month.
- pc86 2y ago
  Thanks! So that 300h of compute is for other branches? Still 24/7 for primary compute on Launch?
  - mj4e 2y ago
    The Launch plan includes 300 compute hours. All your computes draw from this, regardless of whether or not it's a primary branch. For a simple comparison, let's assume you only use 0.25 vCPU computes and your primary compute runs 24/7 (~750 hours per month) to keep the comparison easy: 1. On the Free plan, you can have the primary running 24/7 plus an additional 20 hours for other branches. 2. On the Launch plan, you can have the primary running 24/7 plus an additional 450 hours for other branches. And of course the 10 GiB storage + other paid features. Full details at https://neon.tech/docs/introduction/plans https://neon.tech/docs/introduction/plans

joshstrange 2y ago

I switched my company over to Neon from PlanetScale. In part for the ability to scale up/down easily and also so I could run multiple databases on the same cluster. I also looked at (and spun up) RDS but Neon was way easier to work with and scales to 0 (Aurora Serverless is trash IMHO). Neon starts very quickly as well (hundreds of milliseconds in my testing) which is pretty awesome.

ksec 2y ago
Why switch away from PlanetScale though?
- joshstrange 2y ago
  1 "Database" = 1 Server/Cluster I have 1 database per client and their needs almost never overlap so I wanted to share the underlying server/cluster between them. You can't do that on PlanetScale. Aside from that I liked working them.
dewey 2y ago
Switching over a company, and especially the database, to a beta product that was not public yet…that‘s brave.
- joshstrange 2y ago
  That's fair. It was something I was worried about but I knew the worst-case was I could spin up RDS and move over to that. This is for my personal company and the load on the software is very spiky with long periods of near-zero activity (we did the switch over in one of those zero-activity periods). That gave us an easy on-ramp to testing this DB as a replacement.
- r3trohack3r 2y ago
  Not OP, but I did the same. I have nightly backups dumped to Cloudflare R2 from a GitHub action. If Neon announces they're shutting down, migrating the database to another provider is a bash 1 liner and an hour of downtime. If Neon just "goes dark" I can recover from the nightly backup and lose at most 24 hours of data - data that is denormalized into other systems and can be manually recovered if absolutely necessary (but probably not). Not every company is the same, but for many use cases the database layer is an inconsequential decision as long as the API is fungible for your use case. Not every decision is a 1-way door. The most important way you can spend your time when making a 1-way door decision for a company isn't picking the right door. It's turning the decision into a 2-way door.

mrozbarry 2y ago

I'm working with a client on a greenfield project and I picked postgres as the tech stack. For the staging server, I just locally installed postgres, configured it, and it works perfectly fine. On the flip side, I'd rather just focus on code, and if there's a free tier (which neon has), I'd rather shell that off to a service. So, my question is, what trade offs am I making other than a persistant/local db to off-site (ie probably a degree of speed). Since it's free, does that mean my data might be inspected? I'm under an NDA, and my client would prefer his data stays in-house unless there's a good reason for it not to be.

tristan957 2y ago
We do not inspect user data. We don't even connect to user databases, unless given permission to. You can read our privacy policy here: https://neon.tech/privacy-policy https://neon.tech/privacy-policy. Neon will never be as fast as a database local on your computer, but performance is always something we are paying attention to.
- devjab 2y ago
  If you’re aiming for EU compliance you’re going to need to host the data within the EU and only have EU staff have any sort of access, like running support on it. Microsoft is exempt from that last bit for some reason, but they are Microsoft so they probably cheat. Won’t be a lot of EU enterprise that will be capable of using your services without rather strict compliance. Which may or may not be in your interest but you might as well just be up front about it. With the way EU is heading in regards to data protection it may not just be enterprise organisations either by 2025. Those compliance laws are getting stricter and stricter by the day.
  - tristan957 2y ago
    We support EU regions. Our sales team is happy to talk more about our data compliance.
mbil 2y ago
The free tier gets spun down to idle after five minutes of inactivity. The first request after that usually fails to connect as it takes a few seconds for it to come back up.

sgammon 2y ago

I tried Neon for our startup but ended up going with Planetscale. The stability guarantees seemed weak and still scare me. I would be happy to take another look, but I've had no problems with Vitess, it has been a dream. congrats on your guys' launch to GA.

tristan957 2y ago
I don't really see a reason to move off of Planetscale, which is a very mature offering, if it works for you. There is always a cost when moving Postgres providers, doubly so, when you're moving from MySQL to Postgres. I think the Postgres ecosystem has many differentiating factors where MySQL and MariaDB just can't compete. (Neon engineer)

bittermandel 2y ago

We're self-hosting Neon with an internal Kubernetes operator (keep your eyes out for more info) and we're incredibly happy with Neon's technical solutions. I'm not sure we'd be able to build our company without it :o

clarkbw 2y ago
i'd love to learn more about what you're doing! if you haven't already, please send a message. definitely want to hear lessons learned with your k8s operator.
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andix 2y ago
What's your added value in comparison to using plain Postgres, for example with the CloudnativePG operator for k8s?
- bittermandel 2y ago
  The by far biggest is being able to scale it on top of Ceph, while getting performance from NVMe disks on Pageservers. This enables us to increase efficiency (aka cut costs) by 90%+ in a multi-tenant environment. Of course we don't get the same out of the box experience as CNPG, but considering we have the engineering capacity to build those parts ourselves, it was a no-brainer!
  - andix 2y ago
    Thanks for the explanation! This sounds like the right use case to use something more complex. I’m always hesitant to add additional technology to the stack if it doesn’t provide a bullet proof benefit. A lot of use cases are perfectly fine with plain postgres, and I’m always fighting against polluting the stack with additional unneeded complexity.
  - leftcenterright 2y ago
    Sounds like a good use case. Do you have any benchmarks or numbers which you could share regarding the performance of database? (especially disk writes and reads)

ametrau 2y ago

How many of these comments are sock puppets?

clarkbw 2y ago
42

hhh 2y ago

I have been using Neon for some time now, and have quite liked it.

ashutoshw3 2y ago

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coreyward 2y ago
Either you don’t really rely on your DB or you don’t have monitoring in place. https://x.com/coreyward/status/1734647763151851878 https://x.com/coreyward/status/1734647763151851878

aargh_aargh 2y ago

Reading the pitch and this solves all of the problems I don't have (as a developer and operator of services that don't need to scale to millions of users). How often do you need to clone/restore whole databases, really? But I may be misunderstanding the pitch.

mj4e 2y ago
(Neon PM) instant branching in a development workflow because it's like git but for your database. You can develop or test against an exact copy of production without the risks of testing on production. Autoscaling is useful if the load on your datbase varies (you can save money, even if your app isn't serving millions of users).
- figassis 2y ago
  Until you start firing emails and texts to your production customers :-) That aside, I think Neon is pretty cool. I will wait some time to see how stable a service it is, whether price hikes happen often, or whether VC money destroys it. I think Autora for me is too pricey, but I settled for self hosting PG on Hetzner. I'm there bc Hetzner has been stable for me for years. What I fear the most is having to migrate a db off of some service bc I stopped being their target audience. I know this sucks for startups trying to make it but a risk is a risk. I'll wait and see.
- neeleshs 2y ago
  This is very cool for troubleshooting in production. Testing/developing against a production copy is a no-no, if I'm hosting my customer's data.

doublerabbit 2y ago

> Postgres continues to hold its position as one of the most popular developer databases ever created. Not bashing Postgres, however that statement is an overstatement. Postgres was a "it exists" database back in the early 2000's. All the scripts my scripts kiddie paws could get on were always orientated towards MySQL. Uploading .php3 files on 56k were my teenagers eyes of fun.

makoz 2y ago
Disclaimer work at AWS. > Postgres was a "it exists" database back in the early 2000's. If we're really nitpicking it's not saying Postgres is the most popular database since the early 2000's. If you base it of off install counts as the metric, I would assume the statement is true since I'd think it's either Postgres or MySQL today.
- doublerabbit 2y ago
  I'm glad that Postgres is now a thing and is now being offered in comparison to MySQL. The stack of LAMP in 05's is what kept it down below. LAPP wasn't a thing, which is now. And Apache is falling behind thanks to nginx. It wasn't until JSON and Postgres supporting JSON that made developers change their cog. 2012, and I'd agree. https://www.crunchydata.com/blog/when-did-postgres-become-cool https://www.crunchydata.com/blog/when-did-postgres-become-co... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37066292 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37066292
  - tristan957 2y ago
    I think the real turning point was the introduction of Postgres extension in 9.1 (2011).

nottorp 2y ago

What's a serverless postgres? Does it mean a postgres server hosted by Neon and you basically pay them for administration?

letmeinhere 2y ago
I think it usually means that it's fully queryable by serverless functions, usually via atomic HTTP API calls, and often without network restrictions.
- letmeinhere 2y ago
  But in this case it seems to be referring to the database itself, and the ability to scale to and from zero resources on demand.
tristan957 2y ago
Neon is a managed serverless Postgres offering. "Managed" means we take care of Postgres administration. "Serverless" means that your database isn't running if you're not using it. We put computes to sleep after a certain amount of time. We can also scale database resources up and down as needed. (Neon engineer)

smallshen 2y ago

Is it possible to self host neon? any docs related to that?

tristan957 2y ago
We have a few people self-hosting Neon in this thread who are in our Discord's selfhost channel. Might try jumping in. We don't have too many docs related to self hosting at the moment.

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notamy 2y ago

Why is storage priced so high? Depending on the plan it looks like it can cost anywhere from $1.50 to $1.75 per GB. That feels pretty excessive; maybe I’m missing something that causes it to be so pricy? It actively discourages me from wanting to use it for a hobby project, because the storage costs would send my bill to over $100/month before I even use any compute.

tristan957 2y ago
Storage costs are something we are going to be looking at soon. If we can reduce our cost of goods sold, it is possible to pass on savings to consumers.
- coreyward 2y ago
  You just 10x-ed the prices for storage a couple months ago.

amluto 2y ago

Have you considered publishing pricing for larger databases? It would be interesting to know whether the offering would be useful at sizes not covered by the listed tiers. edit: given the headline feature of infinite PITR capability, knowing the price tag could be quite important. Especially if purging old data isn’t supported (is it?)

tristan957 2y ago
Our Sales team is more than happy to communicate about custom deals. I don't know if our team has given thought about more plans on the web page. I would think we want to keep the number of plans small to give users an easier time parsing the page. I think competitors typically have similar number of plans, but I haven't checked in a while.
- amluto 2y ago
  Aha, I see the $15 per 10 GiB/mo extra in the little info box. That’s … steep, especially for cold data. I have an application on MySQL that I’d love to move to a service like Neon. Maybe I’ll port it to Postgres some day. But not at those storage prices, at least not without serious care.

clarkbw 2y ago

(neon product) hey all, i've only been with neon for a very short time but i'm super excited to be here because i believe neon can deliver an amazing developer experience that databases have been lacking. while we are simply postgres on top the neon platform is something special that unlocks a lot of new possibilities. this ga is simply marking readiness for the platform and the team that has been building it. there's a lot more to do going forward. as we're looking forward, post-GA, i'd love to hear what you think neon needs to focus on next. here's what i'm seeing so far: - improved gh actions integration - more extensions - better developer extension support - autoscaling communications - metrics / logs integrations what else?

tristan957 2y ago
Bryan has great ideas, so stay tuned for more product features soon. (Neon engineer)

CuriouslyC 2y ago

Neat idea, but the stability and assurance of RDS is pretty compelling and migrating databases is pretty much the worst in my experience, even big services like Azure can have unexpected database issues that burn time and money. Also, custom postgres implementations are a bit scary from a performance tuning perspective.

gritzko 2y ago

The feature they call "branches" is more accurately to call "snapshots" or "checkpoints". Creating CoW writable versions and rolling back to past versions - that's snapshots. Branches imply merging, which is a huuuge can of worms, even if we apply last-write-wins, cause referential integrity and things, can't just merge postgreses.

nikita 2y ago
Merging is a tricky one for operational databases. We think merging schemas is a useful feature. Merging data is likely not. The feature is coming!

anentropic 2y ago

This looks awesome (wish I had these features for MySQL on my current project...) Are there any resources for IaC, e.g. terraform provider etc?

clarkbw 2y ago
Yes, we have great APIs ( https://neon.tech/docs/reference/api-reference https://neon.tech/docs/reference/api-reference ) and a Terraform provider ( https://registry.terraform.io/providers/terraform-community-providers/neon/latest/docs https://registry.terraform.io/providers/terraform-community-... )

ForHackernews 2y ago

Is this actually Postgres, or is it some other database that aims to be compatible with the PG wire protocol?

mj4e 2y ago
It’s Postgres.
tristan957 2y ago
Our fork of Postgres is located at https://github.com/neondatabase/postgres https://github.com/neondatabase/postgres.

continuational 2y ago

Branching the whole database (data included) seems really great. Congrats! It does seem a bit pricey though. For $69/month (Scale), I could rent a dedicated server with 8 dedicated CPUs, twice the RAM and 20x the storage (and that's physically attached NVMe in raid 1), and have money to spare: https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ax/ https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ax/

shinypokemon 2y ago
(Neon DevRel) By all means, self-host Neon and come talk about it in our Discord (https://neon.tech/discord https://neon.tech/discord)! Cheeky jokes aside, you can definitely go down the hetzner/VPS route. Not everyone has the expertise or desire to spend time doing so, but if you do, then go for it I say. We have some nifty features that are non-trivial to recreate, but again, it depends on your needs.
dustyduster 2y ago
$69/month is peanuts for anyone running something that hopes to make any amount of money. Developer and operational experience, uptime, etc. seem way more important. Just getting to skip dealing with all that nonsense and focus on whether your idea / startup has any value whatsoever seems far more important. (Obviously if it's just like a hobby deal then run it on a cheap VPS).
hamandcheese 2y ago
Unless it's enough money to spare to pay someone to manage Postgres on the server and scale it up and down as needed, this isn't that useful a comparison. As an avid self-hoster, by all means, self host Postgres! But self hosted Postgres is not the same product as managed Postgres.
riku_iki 2y ago
> For $69/month (Scale) this also doesn't cover 100% uptime, but only 300h, and you will pay extra for each extra hour.
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indymike 2y ago

The name Neon is very confusing as KDE uses that name for it's Linux Distribution and has for quite some time (at least 2017).

tasubotadas 2y ago

How it compares against supabase?

amanda99 2y ago

Does it support extensions like PostGIS?

sakras 2y ago
Yes! We support a lot of extensions, including PostGIS. Full list here: https://neon.tech/docs/extensions/pg-extensions https://neon.tech/docs/extensions/pg-extensions

WuxiFingerHold 2y ago

As far as I know Neon has no filesystem cache, which is the most important performance enhancer for Postgres. As here are many using Neon already in production: Does anyone can comment on the performance for large databases (a couple of tables with around 100 million rows) compared to RDS / Supabase / other hosted service? I can imagine that it is substantially slower. But would be happy to be surprised, if not. Or to learn how Neon compensates the missing filesystem cache.

sakras 2y ago
Neon engineer here. We implemented our own local cache between the pageserver and Postgres (called LFC). It compensates for the lack of a normal file system cache, and scales up with the rest of the autoscaling infrastructure.

jpdb 2y ago

Neon seems really great to me, but I wish I could easily run it locally via Kubernetes. I know there are some projects out there[0] but they are all supported by 3rd parties and things like branching and other features don't appear to be supported. I'd love to be able to just use a helm chart to have Neon in my homelab. [0] https://github.com/itsbalamurali/neon-operator https://github.com/itsbalamurali/neon-operator

kingspact 2y ago

How can you have an SQL database without a server? Do they just mean container-on-demand?

tristan957 2y ago
We spawn a Postgres instance on the fly if it isn't already up in just a few hundred milliseconds. Cold start times are always something we try to improve. (Neon engineer)
- kingspact 2y ago
  A process? Or like a container with Postgres in it?
  - tristan957 2y ago
    It is a VM which is hosted in a Kubernetes pod.
    - kingspact 2y ago
      We just run everything on a small cheap Threadripper with a mere 1/2TB RAM, it just sits in the co-founder's basement.

estebarb 2y ago

The technology is interesting but the billing doesn't convince me. I don't feel that I can scale storage easier with Neon than using just a bigger server with plain Postgresql.

tristan957 2y ago
Neon is more than just Postgres with a storage device. It's a managed service with features like branching, autoscaling, bottomless storage, etc. People who really find Neon valuable usually partake in our "differentiating" features, so if all you need is a managed Postgres, there will definitely be more competitive prices out on the market.

vendiddy 2y ago

I want to use this as a chance to bring attention to a GitHub issue that I think would help reduce friction for Neon: https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/issues/4989 https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/issues/4989 If the Neon driver were to allow us to easily pass in a localhost connection, the development and test experience would be easier. Perhaps Neon could swap to something like this internally: https://github.com/porsager/postgres https://github.com/porsager/postgres. Having run a local dev environment connected to Neon and tests connected to Neon got in our way of adoption. We'd prefer to develop and run tests against a regular Postgres localhost database. To the PMs of Neon, put yourself in the shoes of a new developer thinking of giving Neon a try. What changes will I have to make to my code and my development workflow?

algernonramone 2y ago

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lrsdfnbhof 2y ago

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golondon 2y ago

Do I still need to worry about vacuum and bloat or does Neon intelligently handle these?

coreyward 2y ago

I doubt I’ll ever use Neon again after they had our production database go down several times over just a couple of months Q4 last year. We got tired of the downtime during an incident and we were able to spin up a Supabase PG instance and switch over to it faster than Neon could resolve the incident. It wound up taking them days to resolve it fully. They then increased the prices significantly about a month later. Given that it’s only been four months since these issues, I don’t think that they are serious people in the slightest and don’t trust them with a production database.

nikita 2y ago
(Neon CEO) I'm sorry you had this experience. We had several instabilities in Q4 as the system became popular. That was the one of the reasons we called it "preview" until we got stability to where it needs to be. We are also very transparent about every outage - see neonstatus.com and highlight even the smallest ones. We are also iterating over prices - we were purely consumption before and realized that we need to offer $19 pain plan to start based on the value our customers get. This is in line for what other devplatform charge for using their services.

ArboretumGuy 2y ago

Congrats to Neon on the generally available status. Big vote of confidence. I've looked around and Neon is the only serverless Postgres I’ve seen that provides copy-on-write branching. Every other managed service has some significant seeding limitation when one looks at the details.

youngjake992 2y ago

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youngjake992 2y ago

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