EngineeringJul 11, 2025Separation of storage and compute without a performance tradeoffModern OLTP database systems such as Neon and AWS Aurora separate storage and compute. The main benefits of this architecture are elasticity and being “serverless”. Storage appears “bottomless” and compute scales up and down with the load. A user doesn’t need to commit to a certa...John Spray
EngineeringJun 06, 2025AWS CNI lessons from a Production OutageThis post is the last in a series discussing the Neon outages on 2025 05 16 and 2025 05 19 in our AWS us east 1 region. In this post, we cover the IP allocation failures that persisted through the majority of the disruption. For further details, read our top level Post Mortem her...Em Sharnoff,Mihai Bojin
EngineeringMay 30, 2025Delayed Start Compute Operations – Triggering EventFor further details, read the top level Post Mortem. Summary The Neon Control Plane service is backed by a Postgres database. A scheduled job in the Control plane, Activity Monitor, is responsible for identifying Computes that are ready to be suspended. A Postgres query executed ...Mihai Bojin,Matt Sherman
EngineeringMay 21, 2025Postmortem: Delayed Start Compute OperationsSummary On two occasions in the past week, Neon customers in AWS/us east 1 were unable to create or start inactive databases, for a total period of 5.5 hours. Customers with running databases were unaffected. The root cause related to our ability to assign IP addresses to new dat...Em Sharnoff,Mihai Bojin
EngineeringMay 01, 2025Auto-generating MCP Servers from OpenAPI Schemas: Yay or Nay?Should we be generating Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers directly from existing API specs? MCP is designed to let AI agents like those in Claude, Cursor, and Windsurf interact with tools and APIs. So, can we just treat our existing REST APIs as the interface for LLMs and enti...David Gomes
EngineeringApr 30, 2025Make Yourself at Home with Neon LocalThe term ephemeral gets thrown around a lot in the database world, but what does it actually mean? In the context of database branches, it refers to something temporary, short lived, and not meant to persist. That might sound odd because databases are usually the most permanent p...Jeffrey Christoffersen