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Comment by clpm4j | Hacker News Reader

I've been seriously considering neon for a new application. This definitely gives me pause... maybe plain ol' Postgres is going to be the winner for me again.

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Lucky you, you still can as it's Apache 2 https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/blob/release-8516/LICEN...

I haven't studied the CLA situation in order to know if a rug pull is on the table but Tofu and Valkey have shown that where there's a will there's a way

It's open source like a code dump. There's no support for open source IIRC.

I can't easily add &exclude_maintainers=true but https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Acl... sure does look like quite a bit of merged contributions to me, which is not what I would consider "code dump"

The whole point of a serverless platform is that it's hosted infrastructure. Open source doesn't mean it's feasible to run it yourself.

The whole point to you, but the whole point to me was having scale-to-zero because Aurora Serverless hurp-durp-ed on that. And I deeply enjoy the ability to fix bugs instead of contacting AWS Support with my hat in my hand asking to be put on some corporate backlog for 2073

Thankfully, you can continue to pay Databricks whatever they ask for the privilege of them hosting it for you

Aurora Serverless v2 now scales to zero[1]. And DSQL does pretty much by definition (they use an architecture closer to Neon).

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/introducing-scaling-to...

Why would this give you pause? You just don't want the data to be where Databricks is?

Either way, there are plenty of other serverless Postgres options out there, Supabase being one of the most popular.

Can’t speak for anyone but myself and my experience anecdotally, having used Databricks: I consider them to be the Oracle of the modern era. Under no circumstances would I let them get their hooks into any company I have the power from preventing it.

Why do think so? Databricks notebook product I have used in couple of companies is pretty solid. I have done any google research but they are generally known to be very high talent dense kind of place to work.

You and the parent are not talking about the same things.

This is exactly how I feel. I do not want to be in the Databricks ecosystem.

Supabase, while a great product, does not offer serverless Postgress.

What would you say they offer then if not serverless Postgres?

You set up a database, you connect to it, they take care of the rest. It even scales to $0 if you don't use it.

Is that not serverless Postgres?

That's postgre on their server.

Yes, serverless doesn’t mean no servers.

How is what Supabase offers different from what Neon offers from a user perspective?

Exactly how EC2 is different from Lambda from a user's perspective.

Serverless in the context of Postgres means to decouple storage and compute, so you could scale compute "infinitely" without setting up replica servers. This is what Neon offers, where you can just keep hitting their endpoints with your pg client and it should just take whatever load (in principle) and bill you per request.

Supabase gives you a server that runs classic Postgres in a process. Scaling in this scenario means you increase your server's capacity, with a potential downtime while the upgrade is happening.

You are confusing _managed_ Postgres for _serverless_.

Others in the serverless Postgres space:

- https://www.orioledb.com/ (pg extension)

- https://www.thenile.dev/ (pg "distribution")

- https://www.yugabyte.com/ (not emphasizing serverless but their architecture would allow for it)

https://supabase.com/blog/supabase-acquires-oriole

Interesting. Maybe a new product line will come out of this.

> Why would this give you pause?

After a funding round the value extraction from customers is just over the horizon

Try Supabase!

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