Amazing work by the Team. Congrats y'all. It was one of the best presentations in the PGcon22.

I did email Heikki the following questions, in case if someone from Neon is around here.

a) How does Neon compare to polardb https://github.com/ApsaraDB/PolarDB-for-PostgreSQL.

b) The readme mentions a component "Repository - Neon storage implementation". Does it use any special FileSystem? Any links to read more about it?

c) Heard the cold start is a second (IIRC), how does that value differ if one runs Neon on bare metal instead of k8s?

Thank you!

a. PolarDB is based on a similar idea. https://www.cs.utah.edu/~lifeifei/papers/polardbserverless-s.... This paper describes it. The biggest difference that I see glancing through the paper is that we really integrated S3 into the storage. In Neon architecture branches, backups, checkpoint are all the same thing and instant to run. This simplifies a good amount of database management AND deliver on better costs. S3 is cheap.

b. Neon doesn't need a special filesystem. Neon storage is in a way a filesystem, however it doesn't expose filesystem API. It's a key value store - serves 8k pages to Postgres and a consensus - update API to the key value store. Pages are organized in LSM trees and background processes put layers of the LSM trees to S3.

c. The cols start is 2sec right now. There is a dependency on K8S. Bare metal implementation will require new code to orchestrate starts and stops.

> we really integrated S3 into the storage

Will it be possible to use something else in place of S3? I'm thinking on-premise or what some would call a private cloud.

If you can't wait that long to run Neon on your own cloud, feel free to contribute an integration to your persistent blob storage: the code is available under APLv2 here: https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/