Guest: Nikita Shamgunov (LinkedIn)
Company: Neon (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk

Neon aims to become the default Postgres offering in the cloud, bringing the ability to run Postgres as a serverless offering. Although the company launched just one year ago, it has already onboarded 400,000 databases onto its platform and boasts over 10,000 GitHub stars.

The company provides an open-source alternative to hyperscaler proprietary offerings such as Amazon Aurora. Nikita Shamgunov, CEO of Neon, says that the company aims to take the pain out of databases to boost developer productivity and follow the application development lifecycle rather than being just another piece of IT infrastructure. Developers can easily go onto the platform, push a button or make an API call and will get their database URL within a matter of seconds.

Neon’s serverless Postgres separates storage and compute to offer autoscaling capabilities that save money since the platform understands the concept of copy on write when creating a development and staging environment. So while typically costs run out of control once you start providing lots of environments for the developers, this is not the case with Neon as the bulk of data is central for every environment the developer is using. The platform also provides a preview environment for every pull request with a separate endpoint that gives you the state of the database for that pull request.

One of the key trends Shamgunov is seeing within organizations is pressure to do more with less but he explains that this is something that as a developer tools company they welcome. Although not a new trend, he is also seeing a continuation of the rise of the developer with developers in every organization getting more power. While developer productivity has been a major bottleneck in the past, developers are becoming the most important part of organizations.

Looking ahead, Neon will be focusing on making investments and improvements in the quality of service. They have March next year in sight to become GA and want to have some sort of Neon ‘stamp of quality approval’ on the service by then with regards to uptime, security, availability, and robustness of the overall system. They will continue their focus on developer experience and will be announcing a new product, which is currently known internally as dba.ai.

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.