neon VS python-fake-data-producer-for-apache-kafka

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

For those looking for alternatives check out https://neon.tech/, https://turso.tech/ and https://developers.cloudflare.com/d1/.

I had good experience with Aiven in the past, we needed something located in the EU: https://aiven.io/

Access to Aiven

One of the hardest questions we answer for our large enterprise customers is why they should choose Aiven instead of managing their own database and streaming services. It can seem counterintuitive that paying extra for a managed service can save you money. However, when we factor in economies of scale - particularly in regards to access to specialized knowledge and tooling - the case for managed services becomes clear. This was certainly the case for some of our MySQL clients earlier this year, where their investments in Aiven paid off in the form of a quietly managed bug fix.

And Kafka + Kafka Connect has https://www.confluent.io/ https://aiven.io/ https://upstash.com/ (and not quite Kafka, but protocol-compatible, https://redpanda.com/)

Fake data utility - https://github.com/aiven/python-fake-data-producer-for-apache-kafka

For PostgreSQL, similar offerings are: * Google Cloud SQL * AWS RDS * Digital Ocean Postgres * Azure Database for Postgres * Aiven, Instaclustr etc

Aiven - https://aiven.io/

Majority of companies layer DevRel on top of marketing as a sort of afterthought, and that’s usually a recipe for failure. All four co-founders at Aiven (the company where I work at) have been long-time open-source maintainers/contributors and highly value the work of DevRel. Similar examples can be seen at HashiCorp, where co-founder Armon Dadgar has been doing DevRel on the whiteboard since the early days of the company. Technical founders know the value of DevRel and know when to form a DevRel team. This is very different from bringing your first DevRel hire onboard and making them convince the leadership why the company needs DevRel in the first place. If your developer advocate needs to explain to the technical leadership the need for DevRel, that's a red flag for that individual and the company.

I wonder when Aiven https://aiven.io/ (or something similar) will start supporting hetzner.