Neon: How we made PostgreSQL serverless
summary
Neon offers PostgreSQL as a serverless service by splitting Postgres into a stateless compute layer and a multi-tenant storage service that serves 8KB pages over the network and persists to object stores like S3. A proxy + control plane authenticates connections, PgBouncer handles pooling, and pre-warmed Postgres VMs cut cold starts from ~5 s to under 1 s. Storage is implemented in Rust and enables branching, fast startup, shared read replicas and an HTTP query API for single-shot queries.
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Introduction to Serverless Postgres
- 1:08What does it mean for a service to be serverless
- 4:03Characteristics of serverless
- 7:08Serverless PostgreSQL
- 9:29Neon Architecture – diagram
- 11:57Separation of compute and storage
- 13:06Neon storage system - diagram
- 15:42Autoscaling compute
- 23:24Connection management
- 25:33Conclusion and resources
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