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Comment by nikita | Hacker News Reader

Nikita - CEO of Neon here. We intended to post this at the launch next month, but since it here, I'm happy to answer any questions.

We have been hard at work and looking to open the service to the public soon.

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Hey Nikita, could you maybe put some more legal information on the webpage?

I'm trying to find out if you're a company and where you are located. Is there no legal entity behind this? Do you have a privacy policy?

The company is Neon, Inc., which is registered in the USA. We're a remote company, with a significant portion of the developers being located in Europe.

Yep, Delaware corp with top tier US investors. I'm in the Bay Area. Heikki is in Finland. Stas is in Cyprus. Majority of engineering is in Europe, some in the US and Canada.

Postgres is a global phenomenon.

How “cheap” is it to create new db instances?

I can imagine a world where it might be practical to have one master db for all of your customers/accounts. But a separate db instance for each customer’s data.

Is that the kind of architecture you think might be workable with your system?

It's cheap. Storage footprint is 15Mb and will be shrunk further. Min compute footprint is a 1 core container that shuts down when not used.

We are already working with customers that do that. This is for sure a great use case for Neon.

won't the tiny compute units on AWS have relatively slow storage? (no NVMe allowed for them I think) fine for small datasets that fit in ram but benchmarks are needed to show the bigger picture.

This is really exciting and thank you for making it open source. I am still trying to wrap my head around the Neon, but is there any design document or architecture description? I want to learn more about the Neon storage engine and how it all fits together.

Also, how do I get an invite code to try?

edit: found this to get started - https://neon.tech/docs/storage-engine/architecture-overview/

We will send you an invite code soon. This is a good start and also RFCs on github. We will be publishing more and more

Would love on as well.

Hey Nikita! I was just looking at the docs but I was a bit confused about what the various compute instances were doing. Do they all serve reads and writes? If so, is there data partitioning or does this support distributed transactions?

Various compute instances are different endpoints to separate databases. So for now it's single writer system. You can get a lot of power out of a 128 core compute node. In the future will will also spin up extra compute to scale reads.

In the future after that future we will introduce data partitioning - we have a cool design for it, but one step at a time.

Ah got it thanks! And what's the consistency on the instances that serve reads?

Super interested in this space since we're always looking for ways to evolve our pg!

Ignore this. I misread your previous reply (￣ー￣；

Do you plan to solve for global data-at-the-edge availability? That to me is the killer feature for databases and one I’m direly in need of at work.

Yes, we are discussing either simply using Postgres replication to move data to other regions and use our proxy to rout reads to the datacenter closer to the user (like fly.io). This will have issues with supporting more than ~5 regions.

OR we can separate storage from replication and purpose build a multi-tenant replication service. This will support as many regions as you want (over 200) but it's more work. We will publish an RFC for that.

Cool stuff! Is PostGIS support difficult?

It's supported. The beauty of the architecture is that it doesn't break plugins.

Could you include it in the tech preview? https://neon.tech/docs/cloud/compatibility/

Sure, we will

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