Top all-time · #551
Neon
Company blog · neon.tech/blog · on HN as gmacdataprogramming
Neon is the company blog at neon.tech, writing about data and programming. Since 2022, 109 different Hacker News readers have linked it 246 times, most often “Neon – Serverless, Fault-Tolerant, Branchable Postgres”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-26, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 2 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers mostly link Neon's site, docs and product pages as a reference for its serverless Postgres service. The linked blog posts cover its architecture, storage engine and features.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
The backend for apps and agents. Build with Lakebase Postgres, Auth, Functions, Storage, and an AI Gateway: instant, branchable, serverless.
Most-linked posts?
- Neon – Serverless, Fault-Tolerant, Branchable Postgres27 people · 28 mentions · first linked 2022-06-04
- Neon – Serverless Postgres20 people · 21 mentions · first linked 2022-05-28
- Databricks Acquires Neon5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2025-05-14
- Architecture decisions in Neon, a serverless Postgres service4 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2023-06-06
- 20x faster than pgvector: HNSW index in Postgres with pg_embedding4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-07-12
- Announcing Autoscaling for Postgres – Neon3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-03-30
- Deep Dive into Neon storage engine3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-03-30
- /docs/storage-engine/architecture-overview/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-05-28
- Cold starts just got hot3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-07-25
- /docs/extensions/pg-extensions3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-04-15
What Hacker News says?
FYI, the image at the bottom says "Zenith's prices" instead of "Neon's prices" https://neon.tech/static/saas-illustration-lg-410ada378df755...
Comment linking /static/saas-illustration-lg-410ada378df755f415b2ab6c15364b17.svg
on “Neon – Serverless Postgres”Submitted Neon – Serverless Postgres as a story · 667 points
HN discussionThe docs are available on https://neon.tech/docs/cloud/about/ . It contains some information, but we're looking to expand that while working towards a public beta that's arriving soon.
Comment linking /docs/cloud/about/
on “Neon – Serverless Postgres”Submitted Neon Serverless Postgres is generally available as a story · 324 points
HN discussionCould you include it in the tech preview? https://neon.tech/docs/cloud/compatibility/
Comment linking /docs/cloud/compatibility/
on “Neon – Serverless Postgres”Submitted Why does everyone run ancient Postgres versions? as a story · 265 points
HN discussionShort answer: page servers and cache on compute nodes hide S3 latency. An architecture description is here: https://neon.tech/docs/storage-engine/architecture-overview/ . We will be publishing more on that.
Comment linking /docs/storage-engine/architecture-overview/
on “Neon – Serverless Postgres”Submitted Select ’Hello, World’: Serverless Postgres Built for the Cloud as a story · 253 points
HN discussionThis is really exciting and thank you for making it open source. I am still trying to wrap my head around the Neon, but is there any design document or architecture description? I want to learn more about the Neon storage engine and how it all fits together. Also, how do I get an invite code to try? edit: found this to get started - https://neon.tech/docs/storage-engine/architecture-overview/
Comment linking /docs/storage-engine/architecture-overview/
on “Neon – Serverless Postgres”Submitted Why use Paxos instead of Raft? as a story · 131 points
HN discussionhttps://neon.tech/docs/cloud/compatibility/ says "During technical preview Neon has restrictions on user ability to install PostgreSQL extensions. Following PostgreSQL extensions come pre-installed: [..]"
Comment linking /docs/cloud/compatibility/
on “Neon – Serverless Postgres”Submitted Bringing psql’s \d to your web browser as a story · 76 points
HN discussion(neon employee) and Neon will be available on Azure very soon ( https://neon.tech/blog/neon-is-coming-to-azure )
Comment linking /blog/neon-is-coming-to-azure
on “PostgreSQL 17”Submitted Architecture decisions in Neon, a serverless Postgres service as a story · 55 points
HN discussion(neon ceo). We have lots of examples of this. Here is one with Retool. https://neon.tech/blog/how-retool-uses-retool-and-the-neon-a...
Comment linking /blog/how-retool-uses-retool-and-the-neon-api-to-manage-300k-postgres-databases
on “PostgreSQL 17”Submitted Architecture Decisions in Neon as a story · 48 points
HN discussionIt's been a while since I've looked at elastic pools in Azure, but maybe Neon ( https://neon.tech/ ) or recently Nile ( https://www.thenile.dev/ ) might work in terms of spinning up a bunch of separate logical DBs with shared compute/storage.
Comment linking /
on “PostgreSQL 17”Submitted 20x faster than pgvector: HNSW index in Postgres with pg_embedding as a story · 42 points
HN discussionIt's never available on homebrew the same day so we all worked hard to make it available the same day on Neon. If you want to try out the JSON_TABLE and MERGE RETURNING features you can spin up a free instance quickly. https://neon.tech/blog/postgres-17 (note that not all extensions are available yet, that takes some time still)
Comment linking /blog/postgres-17
on “PostgreSQL 17”Submitted Postgres Storage as a Transaction Journal as a story · 22 points
HN discussionA lot of marketing fluff and exaggerations but the core of is very interesting. Combine this with a real serverless Postgres like https://neon.tech/ and this could indeed change a lot the way mainstream apps are build an deployed.
Comment linking /
on “Deno raises $21M”Submitted Scaling serverless Postgres: How we implement autoscaling as a story · 16 points
HN discussionMy employer (Neon) offers Postgres databases that run on top of a couple of caching layers at the end of which there is S3: https://neon.tech/docs/introduction/architecture-overview Directly exposing every write to S3 gives you the partial overwrite issues as described. But one can collect a bunch of traffic and push state to S3 once it reaches a threshold. Instead, a few writes in the postgres WAL are held outside…
Comment linking /docs/introduction/architecture-overview
on “S3 is files, but not a filesystem”Submitted Quicker Serverless Postgres Connections as a story · 11 points
HN discussionThis might be of interest to you: https://neon.tech/blog/bring-your-own-s3-to-neon . There's also the OG Aurora whitepaper: https://www.amazon.science/publications/amazon-aurora-design...
Comment linking /blog/bring-your-own-s3-to-neon
on “S3 is files, but not a filesystem”Submitted Neon Authorize: Simplifying row-level security for Postgres as a story · 10 points
HN discussionNeon — Ship Faster with Postgres ( https://neon.tech ) | Remote | Full Time Neon is distributed team building open-source, cloud-native Postgres. We are a well-funded startup with deep knowledge of Postgres internals and decades of experience building databases. Our storage layer is written in Rust, and our cloud control plane is written in Go. We are on a mission to enable developers to “Ship faster with Postgres”.…
Comment linking /blog/architecture-decisions-in-neon
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2024)”Submitted Neon Autoscaling Is Generally Available as a story · 9 points
HN discussionNeon — Ship Faster with Postgres ( https://neon.tech ) | Remote | Full Time Neon is distributed team building open-source, cloud-native Postgres. We are a well-funded startup with deep knowledge of Postgres internals and decades of experience building databases. Our storage layer is written in Rust, and our cloud control plane is written in Go. We are on a mission to enable developers to “Ship faster with Postgres”.…
Comment linking /blog/architecture-decisions-in-neon
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2025)”Submitted Bringing psql's \d to your web browser as a story · 9 points
HN discussion
