August 2022 Summaries

Percona Live, a major open source database conference, took place in Texas on May 16, 2022, where Neon was a participant. The focus of the event was on Developer Experience (DevX), and it highlighted the increasing number of companies managing over 1000 databases in production despite the complexities involved. Neon's solution is to provide free, easy-to-use, and managed self-service tools for developers. During a talk at the conference, Neon demonstrated how to set up a free cloud Postgres with just one click and explained the underlying architecture that enables this feature. Other DevX features, such as scale-to-zero, branching, time travel, and PITR, were also discussed. To explore these offerings, interested parties can request early access to Neon.

Neon participated in the Percona Live 2022 conference, a major open-source database event held in Texas, where developer experience (DevX) was a key topic of discussion. Neon offers a cloud-based Postgres database solution that emphasizes ease of use, allowing developers to access production-ready databases with a single click. During a presentation at the conference, it was demonstrated how Neon's architecture supports features like scale-to-zero, branching, and time travel, which streamline database management for developers. The discussion highlighted the growing trend of companies managing over 1000 databases in production and underscored the importance of providing developers with easy and cost-effective self-service tools.

Neon uses Paxos instead of Raft for its consensus replication due to the separation of storage and compute, which allowed it to keep Postgres changes to a minimum. Neon distinguishes between several types of nodes, including compute nodes and safekeepers, and uses Paxos-like separation of concerns and recovery procedure, Raft-like election procedure, and TLA⁺ to check its modifications. The main difference between Paxos and Raft is how they are described, with Paxos having a more bottoms-up approach and Raft following a top-down approach. Neon's replication protocol is designed to solve the atomic broadcast problem with some small quirks, such as the use of separate roles for compute nodes and safekeepers. The system has a control plane that eventually resolves competing nodes, ensuring safety even in the presence of failures. Verification of the correctness of Neon's thought process was done using TLA⁺, which proved to be an excellent tool.

Neon, a company focusing on distributed systems, opts for Paxos over Raft for its consensus replication due to its architecture, which separates storage and compute, replacing the PostgreSQL persistency layer with a custom-made distributed storage system written in Rust. This separation allows some nodes to operate without persistent disks, and Paxos supports proposers without storage, unlike Raft, which requires uniform nodes. While Raft offers a more user-friendly approach by simplifying the implementation of consensus protocols, Neon's architecture benefits from Paxos's flexibility in handling different roles for nodes, such as compute nodes as proposers and safekeepers as acceptors. Neon's strategy involves maintaining a general Paxos approach while incorporating specific Raft concepts, such as term assignment, to achieve high availability and failover in their PostgreSQL setup. Despite the inherent complexity of designing distributed consensus protocols, Neon's approach aims to minimize changes to PostgreSQL while ensuring reliability, even in the event of node or network failures.