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Architecture decisions in Neon, a serverless Postgres service

The idea behind Neon is to create a new serverless Postgres service with a modern cloud-native architecture. When building for the cloud it usually is a good idea to separate storage and compute. For operational databases such design was first introduced by AWS Aurora 1, followed by many others 2 3, however none of the implementations were […]

If we took a similar approach due to the fact that we don’t control the filesystem tier, it would be hard to efficiently integrate it with the cloud and result in a clunky and expensive solution. In the background, old data is reorganized by merging and deleting old files, to keep read latency in check and to garbage collect old page versions that are no longer needed for PITR. By relying on object storage, we don’t necessarily need multiple copies of data in the page servers, and we can utilize fast but less reliable local SSDs.

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