Neon – Serverless, Fault-Tolerant, Branchable Postgres
neon.tech
neon.tech
I haven't benchmark it yet, but overall my api response api response times have decreased from 1-2 seconds to <1 second compared with the free tier aws RDS postgres DB.
That's not a cold start anymore. You just made a warm instance pool. What a waste of time this was.
How is that a waste of time? As a customer I don't pay for the warm instance pool and the startup times from 0 are insane. AWS Aurora Serverless (v1 at least, I hated it enough I never tried v2) had startup times that took 5-10+ seconds so being able to start serving queries in less than a fraction of a second is nothing short of magical.
This means when you try to use it again, there is a cold start penalty.
You can architect your app around this a little bit, like having your web service "wake up" your database when you suspect one of your users is about to use it.
I enjoyed using Neon in a small project but the cold start was a significant penalty to the point where you might just want to send keep-alive transactions all the time, but it seems like they've made significant improvements to that earlier this year[1].
It is theoretically possible to get it to 50ms range.
I'd be interested to see if you guys can hit 50ms without keeping more chunks of data in at least lukewarm memory. That probably comes at an increased baseline running cost for that database. Maybe customers would be willing to pay a bit extra to enable "turbo" cold starts for the databases that would benefit from it.