Neon CEO here.

There are a number of ideas in the database space that the industry is adopting across the board:

- Separation of storage and compute (Neon, AlloyDB, Aurora). Every cloud database should built one. It's a big undertaking, but benefits are undeniable.

- Good query processor for analytics (Snowflake, Velox, Singlestore)

- Open source. Especially in OLTP open source == trust

- HTAP. Can run mixed workload (Singlestore, Unistore): both OLTP (apps) and OLAP (reporting). This has always been a dream, but we still live in the world of dedicated systems: E.g. Snowflake and Postgres.

- Shared nothing sharding (Vitess). This is the most controversial as you lose compatibility with the mothership (MySQL for Vitess). So it's unclear this will be the dominant architecture in the future. I think the world may get to "dynamic sharding" where storage stays separate and compute can be multinode and the user can easily and instantly change the number of nodes.