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Comment by refset | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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

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

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