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Comment by amazingamazing | Hacker News Reader

Not too familiar with Neon other than the basics - its premise is that you use S3 as bottomless storage for Postgres and it’s otherwise the same as standard Postgres right? And this is all open source? Why are people paying? Can’t you use a cloud provider and have them host this for you?

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> you use S3 as bottomless storage for Postgres [...] Why are people paying?

It's vastly more complicated to do this efficiently than you might imagine. Postgres' internal architecture is built around a very different set of assumptions (pages, WAL, local disk etc.) than what the S3 API offers.

I get that, but my understanding is that they opened sourced this itself, no?

It's not clear to me that the _entire_ Neon stack is OSS and available to self-host (though they do share a lot of OSS code, which is great), and in any case, it's not currently supported/documented beyond some "local development" instructions, e.g. "We do not officially support use of autoscaling externally" [0]

> Can’t you use a cloud provider and have them host this for you?

If it really is all OSS, then I guess the moat is the impressive execution of this team.

[0] https://github.com/neondatabase/autoscaling

The only component which is not currently open source is the control plane.

There are some sections of the code that is close-source. Like the Console, but the devs are very active in their Discord. There is a small community trying to self-host, and from what I have seen gotten most of it working. There isn't an easy way to start it up for a more junior developer, but if you want to self-host it you are able to since all "components" are available

Would "essential internal abstraction, with the introduction of read stream APIs" evolve into full storage abstraction?

https://pganalyze.com/blog/5mins-postgres-17-streaming-io

Hosting and operating the autoscaling of the various services (compute, pageserver, safekeeper, storage broker) that it takes to make all that work is complex enough that most folks would rather not. Same as any other "managed X" service.

Neon is only scale-to-zero from the point of view of the tenants; whoever runs the software, must keep nodes running, including triple-replicated WAL storage.

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