Taking Postgres serverless

October 14, 2022The Changelog

This week we’re talking about serverless Postgres! We’re joined by Nikita Shamgunov, co-founder and CEO of Neon. With Neon, truly serverless PostgreSQL is finally here. Neon isn’t Postgres compatible…it actually is Postgres! Neon is also open source under the Apache License 2.0. We talk about what a cloud native serverless Postgres looks like, why developers want Postgres and why of the top 5 databases only Postgres is growing (according to DB-Engines Ranking), we talk about how they separated storage and compute to offer autoscaling, branching, and bottomless storage, we also talk about their focus on DX — where they’re getting it right and where they need to improve. Neon is invite only as of the recording and release of this episode, but near the end of the show Nikita shares a few ways to get an invite and early access.

We talk about what a cloud native serverless Postgres looks like, why developers want Postgres and why of the top 5 databases only Postgres is growing (according to DB-Engines Ranking), we talk about how they separated storage and compute to offer autoscaling, branching, and bottomless storage, we also talk about their focus on DX — where they’re getting it right and where they need to improve. Neon is invite only as of the recording and release of this episode, but near the end of the show Nikita shares a few ways to get an invite and early access.

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Featuring:

Nikita Shamgunov – Twitter, Website
Adam Stacoviak – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
Jerod Santo – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn

Show Notes:

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Timestamps:

(00:00) - This week on The Changelog
(01:18) - Sponsor: Fly
(03:31) - Start the show!
(03:51) - Welcome Nikita
(06:46) - Are people moving to serverless?
(11:39) - Why is this space growing so fast?
(14:36) - Can we get merging?
(16:43) - How do you scale a database to zero?
(24:09) - How do you determine cold data?
(26:55) - Sponsor: InfluxData
(27:57) - This is ground breaking, so how did you do it?
(30:49) - Are you running a fork of Postgres?
(32:47) - Will your Postgres code make it upstream?
(34:37) - Coiuld those changes live in userland?
(35:22) - Could someone standup your open source?
(36:44) - How does data move around the latency tiers?
(38:39) - Where does AI play a role?
(41:46) - Will this run on the edge?
(52:07) - Sponsor: Retool
(52:49) - The DX of Neon
(58:44) - Where does your roadmap live?
(1:00:26) - Time invested? Time to first paying customer?
(1:03:33) - The impact of usage based billing on revenue
(1:08:57) - Will Postgres only hold you back?
(1:12:17) - What didn't we ask you?
(1:13:02) - Job openings?
(1:15:52) - How do you get access?
(1:17:13) - Free until Q1-2023
(1:20:49) - Share an invite code?
(1:21:55) - Closing out the show
(1:22:28) - Outro

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