amzn-drivers VS neon

Amazon (AWS) cloud EC2 instance specific role (Kernel and User space networking, linux OS related). Amazon has it's own network card with it's own linux driver (open source), for user space they use DPDK (open source). https://github.com/amzn/amzn-drivers I've measured the time between calling tcp send in software, and packet leaving the NIC (network card), it is around ~50 microseconds latency, aws also stated in a paper it is around that number. Goals:- Figure out the way to build from source code and load the kernel.- Reduce latency

It means, for example, writing a FreeBSD kernel driver for Elastic Network Adapter (ENA). Both Linux kernel driver and FreeBSD kernel driver is available at https://github.com/amzn/amzn-drivers

Of course, there are.

I was mostly running on AWS. In terms of hardware, for small packets loadtests most systems are constrained on throughput, i.e. number of packets per second. Some systems saturate on interrupts reaching 100% CPU on all cores and some can not even saturate the CPU and you will see that CPU is at 60% but you can not go beyond some limit. Best systems networkwise are c6gn family types. They are also better than other cloud provide. btw, you mentioned hypervisors... About 8 months ago I opened a bug on AWS Graviton team https://github.com/amzn/amzn-drivers/issues/195 - about performance issue they had on their instances at high throughput. Recently they issued the fix. I suspect it was in their hypervisor.

In terms of my software I found many performance bugs at those speeds. For example, using a default allocator is a big no. I use mimalloc for uncontended allocations. In general, you can not use mutexes and spinlocks at those speeds. Those will just cripple the system. Sometimes it can be very annoying since you can not rely on a 3rd party library without carefully analyzing its design. For example, I could not use openmetrics c++ library because it was not performant enough. Even to implement a simple counter, say to gather statistics for INFO command becomes an interesting engineering problem:

https://doc.dpdk.org/guides/nics/ena.html

and:

https://github.com/amzn/amzn-drivers/tree/master/userspace/dpdk/enav2-vfio-patch

Enabling IOMMU on i3 or c5 metal instances is as easy as adding "iommu=1 intel_iommu=on" to /etc/default/grub followed by update-grub, reboot.

I can't get this to work. Everything I update grub and reboot I cannot re-connected via ssh. Also EC2 console fails to get good status.

My config:

Ubuntu 20.04 stock AWS AMI x86 64-bit

If you're reading this you probably got a really steep bill from Neon after finding yourself on their "Scale" plan. If you do want to stay with Neon but avoid surprise bills then go to the Plans page and choose what you actually want.

Such is the case with Neon, a serverless Postgres service, that went generally available on April 15. Congrats Nikita Shamgunov and team on the launch. When I saw the announcement, I knew I had to try it out for myself and report back with my findings.

I want to use this as a chance to bring attention to a GitHub issue that I think would help reduce friction for Neon:

https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/issues/4989

If the Neon driver were to allow us to easily pass in a localhost connection, the development and test experience would be easier. Perhaps Neon could swap to something like this internally: https://github.com/porsager/postgres.

Having run a local dev environment connected to Neon and tests connected to Neon got in our way of adoption. We'd prefer to develop and run tests against a regular Postgres localhost database.

To the PMs of Neon, put yourself in the shoes of a new developer thinking of giving Neon a try. What changes will I have to make to my code and my development workflow?

Neon is an open source and cloud-native serverless database platform that focuses on simplicity and ease of use. It supports Postgres databases and offers built-in features like bottomless storage, autoscaling, and branching.

For MySQL, we've got PlanetScale, and for PostgreSQL, there's Neon.

8. https://neon.tech/As you might know not one tool fits all, I still have strong preferences for the following. It helps me get going faster and get things done right first time and helps in ease of maintenance.

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Migrated away when they removed the free tier, ended up using https://neon.tech/

Cool! At Neon[0], I work full time on our custom postgres proxy[1]. It's a very nice protocol to work with, although our usecase is quite a bit more complex compared to the ideas presented in the post.

Neon databases scale to zero, so the proxy needs to spin up databases on the fly. The proxy doesn't do that but it knows if the databases is running and asks our control plane to schedule it if it isn't. It's a fun service to maintain.

The biggest pain is error handling. Postgres is really bad for error messages and codes. The only available code we can use is usually protocol violation...

[0]: https://neon.tech/

Neon - PostgreSQL