Neon Postgres

Neon Postgres is a fully managed, serverless Postgres solution that features a free tier. It distinguishes itself by separating storage and compute, thereby enabling autoscaling, branching, and extensive storage capabilities. Developers can initiate serverless Postgres with a singular command, which is designed to be scalable and cost-effective. The compute function dynamically scales to meet demand during peak hours, and scales back to zero when idle, whilst cold storage is offloaded to S3 for cost efficiency.

The separation of storage and compute also facilitates on-demand scalability. The compute function is activated upon an incoming connection and scales back to zero when idle, ensuring compatibility with Postgres. Neon's compute resources are dynamically adjusted based on workload. Furthermore, Neon's storage system is uniquely designed as a fault-tolerant, scale-out system built specifically for the cloud. It integrates with cloud object stores such as S3 to offload cold data, which optimizes cost. This storage architecture guarantees high availability, scalability, and unlimited capacity, referred to as “bottomless storage”.

Neon's storage technology utilizes the “copy-on-write” technique to offer database branching, online check pointing, and point-in-time restore, eliminating the need for costly full-data backup and restore operations. This storage technology, written in Rust, is open source. Neon Postgres also provides the ability to instantly branch your Postgres database to support modern development workflows. This feature allows for the creation of branches for test environments and for every deployment in your CI/CD pipeline. These branches are created using the “copy on write” technique, making them virtually cost-free.