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Databricks in talks to acquire startup Neon for about $1B

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Re: Databricks in talks to acquire startup Neon for about $1B

#171

Post by clarkbw »

matt-p wrote: post #170

Neon is a interesting product and they've got some great Postgres engineers. Having said that 1 Second cold starts are still quite painful for a website/web app. I hope the $19 plans are there to stay - but I somewhat doubt it.

cold starts are 500ms on average, and that's only for the first call that wakes up the db from hibernation. people still seem to think that this latency happens for every call (see other threads here) but once the service has woken up (cold start over) you're back to regular (sub 10ms) latency timings and the service continues to run that way. you'll only hit a cold start again if (you have this option turned on) your service goes idle for > 5 min. You can turn scale-to-zero off and you'll run 24/7, have zero cold starts.

$19 plan is going away, will launch a better $5 plan soon.

Re: Databricks in talks to acquire startup Neon for about $1B

#172

Post by 999900000999 »

jimbokun wrote: post #62
999900000999 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s harder than signing up for Firebase. You have to understand a separate set of concerns. Spin something up on ec2, hook it into a db, configure https , figure out why it went down, etc. You’re right though, once I build a complex front end I want someone else to do the backend.

You need all that stuff when you need to scale. For an MVP you can get away with very little.

It depends on how you deploy it.

Django on Render( and presumably a heroku) just works.

It's still much more work that just dropping in a Firebase url. Firebase can lead to poor design choices and come back to bite you, but hopefully by then you've already raised a few VC rounds and you're rolling in dough.

Re: Databricks in talks to acquire startup Neon for about $1B

#173

Post by jordan1212k »

__s wrote: post #155
jmull wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More specifically, the idea is "serverless" posgres. But as I mentioned, I mean from a tech standpoint... If you're interested, they've posted various things about how the tech works. > It seems like execution >>> idea in this case I don't know what >>> means here, so possibly I complete agree or perhaps completely disagree.

>>> means "way better than"

Execution is more valuable than any individual technology. And the moats of the largest companies are only in part technical.

Re: Databricks in talks to acquire startup Neon for about $1B

#175

Post by cpursley »

999900000999 wrote: post #166
cpursley wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't used their edge functions yet. What's the issue with Deno (I'm not familier with it)? For the other stuff, what do you find quirky?

Firebase let's you write functions in normal node js and Python. Supabase only supports Deno. The quirkiness is my own server side logic. Tbf, I've tried to build this project at least 4 times and I might need to take a step back.

You aren’t forced to use their serverless runtime - you can pull their js lib into anything and sent events in several ways. There’s even Python libs.

Re: Databricks in talks to acquire startup Neon for about $1B

#176

Post by matt-p »

clarkbw wrote: post #171
matt-p wrote: post #170

Neon is a interesting product and they've got some great Postgres engineers. Having said that 1 Second cold starts are still quite painful for a website/web app. I hope the $19 plans are there to stay - but I somewhat doubt it.

cold starts are 500ms on average, and that's only for the first call that wakes up the db from hibernation. people still seem to think that this latency happens for every call (see other threads here) but once the service has woken up (cold start over) you're back to regular (sub 10ms) latency timings and the service continues to run that way. you'll only hit a cold start again if (you have this option turned on) you…

I use neon quite a bit, profiling seems to show ~600-980ms of extra latency. This is in the AWS London region, on postgres 15/16.

Regardless if I've got a website that's used a couple of times a hour every hour then the practical reality is almost all users have a extra second of latency or so.

I'm not complaining, it's a great product that I'll continue to use, but it's the biggest pain point.

Re: Databricks in talks to acquire startup Neon for about $1B

#177

Post by mohon »

fock wrote: post #169
mohon wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They keep using the core Postgre while they touch the storage layer to works with S3. Can try ro read more here https://jack-vanlightly.com/analyses/2023/11/15/neon-serverl...

Thank you, very nice read! (Though from some scanning it looks like it mostly helps reads)

You're welcome. I think for the write part, it's always back to the old classic consensus. In then end there always that distributed voting mechanism to decide the write order
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