We spawn a Postgres instance on the fly if it isn't already up in just a few hundred milliseconds. Cold start times are always something we try to improve.
(Neon engineer)
A process? Or like a container with Postgres in it?
It is a VM which is hosted in a Kubernetes pod.
We just run everything on a small cheap Threadripper with a mere 1/2TB RAM, it just sits in the co-founder's basement.