I’m not extremely well versed in the topic so forgive the ignorance: how does this differ from AWS Aurora’s offering? is pricing or scaling different. It’s not immediately obvious why you would want to use this instead.
I wish you the best of luck, but please know that for a lot of us time is money and also literally our most invaluable / irreplaceable asset, and also tech startups who want us to make a bet on them need to have some sort of value proposition given the risk of "you might die or disapear or be aqui-hired in three months after we moved" so I would encourage to not answering this as your 1).
To me the instinctive reaction is "it's for when you will have time to fool around and figure it out by yourself". It is my opinion only, it's worth nothing more than that, and I realize you didn't ask for it, but I just wanted to let you know.
"Unlike AWS Aurora we decided to open source all the changes in Postgres and also send them upstream as well as fully open source our cloud native storage."
Also, at the top right there's a link to the GitHub repo: https://github.com/neondatabase/neon
You can find replies from folks in this thread as well discussing self hosted deployments and you can find an entire discord channel dedicated to that topic here: https://discord.gg/92vNTzKDGp
I'm not associated with Neon and I've never used it before and I certainly don't disagree with your sentiment, but it seems like Neon has gone above and beyond in making sure that workloads could continue to run in the event the company fails and broadly assuaging those concerns.
(Neon engineer)
> (Neon DevRel here) [...] However, many production databases won't scale to zero often.
I think a planned consistent message might be best
Neon won't pull the rug from under an active production database by scaling to 0 when there are still active queries, instead it'll scale databases to 0 only after a longer period of inactivity. So production databases are less likely to scale to 0 because they generally are active most of the time, yet Neon does scale to 0 when it's possible and allowed.