Neon Twin: Move Dev/Test/Staging to Neon, Keep Production on RDS

This blog post explores the advantages of using a Neon Twin to synchronize a copy of an AWS RDS production database with Neon, thus optimizing development environments without the need to migrate the entire production database. By employing GitHub Actions to automate a nightly pg_dump and restore process, businesses can benefit from Neon's rapid development features, such as instant database provisioning, branching, and automated scaling, all while keeping the production environment on RDS. The post provides detailed instructions on setting up a Neon Twin, including prerequisites like RDS connection strings, GitHub repository access, and using the same AWS region to minimize costs. It addresses known limitations such as GitHub Actions job execution limits and IP address restrictions, while also introducing a tool called Twin Thing to assist with creating GitHub Actions workflows. The guide concludes by pointing to upcoming parts of the series that will introduce Slack alerts for monitoring and deploying tested changes back to the RDS production environment.