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Comment by cpursley | Hacker News Reader

Whatever. I was able to set up Neon Postgres in 5 mins. It’s still crazy fast with my Fly services, has replication out of the box and backups. Much easier than AWS and from what I can tell, getting something going with Railway. And I don’t have to worry about operating it. My time is valuable.

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All of that can be true. What I wonder is — if that all is true — how much of a moat is there around that? It seems like the secret sauce in that company isn’t some custom technology, it’s execution. Execution can be replicated by another competent team. Or is there some other secret sauce that I can’t see?

It's the team, they have a few Postgres committers and major contributors, and there are not that many of them. But that's a bit precarious, the team may leave after the acquisition for many reasons.

Execution is some of the hardest secret sauce of all

I completely agree... in my comment, the word "competent" was doing a lot of heavy lifting.

And it begs comparisons to comments about Dropbox/rsync, etc...

But, I personally think the Neon concept of branching databases with CoW storage is quite interesting. That, combined with cost-management with autoscaling does seem like at least a serviceable moat.

These are features of any managed database service.

DigitalOcean, Railway, Render, and so on all offer the exact same feature except it's just pure Postgres and you can deploy them in the same data center as your application.

Render nor DO offer logical replication and are missing some other features.

400ms added latency is really bad for user experience. Do a few queries and you’re going to need to add caching. Now you’re spending your precious developer time managing caching invalidation in lots of places instead of just setting up your database properly in the beginning.

Except it's not between neon and fly:

https://neon.tech/blog/how-to-minimise-the-impact-of-databas...

https://neon.tech/demos/regional-latency

I understand there are ways to deal with the problem of latency in serverless, but this is a problem I'd rather not deal with in the first place. The database IS the application, and I would not want to sacrifice speed of the database for anything. Serverless is totally not worth the trade-off for me: slightly more convenient deployments, for much higher latency to the database.

I'm a solo dev that has been installing and running my own database server with backups for decades and have never had a problem with it. It's so simple, and I have no idea why people are so allergic to managing their own server. 99% of apps can run very snappily on a single server, and the simplicity is a breath of fresh air.

That's why I'm working hard on bringing in a tightly integrated support for SQLite in the Elixir ecosystem (via a Rust FFI bridge): because in my professional experience not many applications need something as hardcore and amazing as PostgreSQL; at least 80% of all apps I ever witnessed would be just fine with an embedded database.

I share similar experiences like yours and others in this thread, and to me all those operational concerns grow into unnecessary noise that distracts from the real problems that we are paid to solve.

Are you referring to cold start latencies?

Not just cold start (another problem you have to worry about with serverless). There's the simple fact that network latency outside of the same datacenter is ALWAYS slow and randomly unpredictable, especially if you have to run multiple queries just to render a single page to your user. A database should always be over LAN in my opinion, if you need to access data over the internet, at that point it should be over an API/HTTP, not internal database access.

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