Neon: How we made PostgreSQL serverless

Neon offers PostgreSQL as a serverless cloud service, which can automatically scale depending on the workload, and can scale all the way down to zero when it’s not used. That is a good fit for modern stateless applications.

A database is very stateful by its nature, and PostgreSQL is a mature piece of server software. Creating the serverless illusion is not trivial. I will walk through some of the challenges and solutions in bridging that gap:

• Start up in < 1 s
• Separating compute and storage
• Running PostgreSQL in a microVM in Kubernetes
• Connection management and pooling