Neon Postgres

Separating storage from compute is the whole design of Neon, an open-source serverless Postgres platform that substitutes the PostgreSQL storage layer by redistributing data across a cluster of nodes.

An installation is compute nodes plus the Neon storage engine. The compute nodes are stateless PostgreSQL nodes backed by that engine, which has two major components. A pageserver acts as the scalable storage backend, and safekeepers form a redundant write-ahead log service that stores WAL durably until the pageserver has processed it and uploaded it to cloud storage.

Running it locally shows the shape of the system.

• Pageserver: serves pages to the compute nodes and owns the path out to cloud storage.
• Safekeepers: receive WAL from a compute node and hold it until it has been processed.
• Tenants and timelines: data is organized per tenant, with timelines underneath each one.
• Branches: a timeline can be branched by name and a Postgres endpoint started on that branch.
• neon_local: a CLI starts the pageserver, safekeeper and broker, then creates endpoints for experiments.

Building requires Rust, protoc 3.15 or newer, and a long list of system packages documented for Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Arch and macOS. That local path suits small experiments and testing code changes, while the hosted free tier is the quicker way to get a connection string and a client attached.