Neon: A serverless open-source alternative to AWS Aurora Postgres

I've been using https://neon.tech in production at Devlog https://dev.log.xyz for the last few months, really quite happy with the pricing and the performance. Clearly made by and for developers.

The only surprise I had was that they don't show you any database logs! Turns out I haven't needed this so it's not a big deal, but that's the biggest departure from a "traditional hosted postgres" service.

Aside from that, the only missing feature is the ability to create an Organization rather than hosting projects in a personally-affiliated account, but this is apparently coming soon.

The branching features work really well and I've used it a few times now to debug issues and test migrations without impacting production. I haven't set up the per-pull-request-preview-environment stuff yet but I plan to and I like that Neon makes it easy.

EDIT: oh, the one other annoyance is that last time I checked, it was not possible to create a read-only replica in a different region than the primary compute node. Or something like that, I'm still not sure, and multi-region read replicas are not particularly necessary for me right now (Devlog still in early alpha, not a lot of customers) so I just moved on. Issue tracked here https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/issues/4178

This is crazy I just stumbled upon this company earlier today via search when I realized that Aurora Postgres Serverless V2 no longer allows you to scale down to 0 in times of low usage. AWS makes you select 0.5 ACUs as the minimum for V2 where with V1 you could select 0... is this just a straight up money grab by AWS to make the minimum monthly cost for aurora like $50 or is there a justifiable reason behind making you run virtual servers continually when there is no usage. I may be switching soon!

The company's site https://neon.tech/ made it easier to understand what it is, for me. The Github README struggles with identifying its audience, IMO.

This is the company vercel has bet on to power their managed DB. Stacked team behind it. One of the few managed postgres companies that will still exist years from now.

Been on neon for a while. Using it for simple queries and RAG (pgvector). The thing I like about it most is the speed where I can get query output in 200ms-500ms. Incredibly fast. Given the serverless nature, it's my go to for any POCs or tests I do personally. In production, querying on neon is faster than our inhouse postgres we provision from AWS.

One really hacky application I saw was a pg search and show results without the user having to press a button. Here: https://next-ai-news.vercel.app/search?q=

I'm curious what the largest DB hosted on Neon is currently? Can you potentially scale postgres infinitely with neon without needing to shard etc?

Here is the helm chart: https://github.com/neondatabase/helm-charts/tree/main Although documentation is sparse.

Percona has a good walkthrough on how to spin up neondatabase via plain docker containers, which is a good way of pulling the system apart into logical units (storage broker, safekeeper, pageserver), and branching from an existing tenant/timeline:

https://www.percona.com/blog/using-docker-to-deploy-neon-ser...

I’m a big fan of Neon postgres. It’s pretty much unbeatable value for the price. The documentation is good and multi-tech stack friendly and I created a repo in which I added all the awesome links about Neon Postgres - https://github.com/tyaga001/awesome-neon and wrote a tutorial https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/build-an-invoice-saas-app-...

This has got to be one of the slickest websites I've seen on the web, kudos strongly deserved.

On the tech itself, it's a shame nothing like this exists for MySQL, but not surprising.

What makes this attractive to me is the ‘database branching’ functionality and simple setup for it.

Managing databases locally and in CI isn’t much fun when dealing with migrations, so the fact you can trivially work with a copy in a branch, or deploy preview builds in PRs with their own DB branch, is a great innovation.

I mean, sure you could slap something similar together with some scripts, but having it out of the box is good dev ex.

I thought that Postgres was an open-source alternative to AWS Aurora Postgres?

If any neon product people are on here, please bring it to gcp

Sounds like a neat idea.

Is it compatible with postgresql extensions? (Do most extension live in the compute layer?)

Shouldn't the title be,

Neon: A serverless open-source alternative to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL Compatible.

neon.tech's offering looks good - the $69 offering.

Any reviews?