Other S3-compatible remote storage and differences to Aurora PostgreSQL w/ Serverless V2?

General
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Hello,

I’m looking at Neon as one option for my next project. The managed cloud offering seems to support all the extensions that I could currently need and the branching model seems interesting so far.

I can see from the self-hosted configuration that there’s the possibility to use a S3-compatible remote storage other than AWS S3. Such a configuration doesn’t seem possible in the cloud offering currently, is it? If not, is it on the roadmap?

It’s also quite hard for me to compare Neon to something like Aurora PostgreSQL w/ Serverless V2. I can see differences in the supported extensions, the branching model, and the possibility to self-host. Is there anything more? What differences are currently and in the future in focus?

Thanks!

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This is indeed currently not possible due to configuration limitations - we currently don’t have the configuration options in place at our Pageservers and Safekeepers to support project- or tenant-level S3 bucket overrides. We’ve talked about this internally and may support this in the future, but it’s not currently on the roadmap.

The primary differences are currently:

  • Scale-to-zero: Aurora Serverless V2 does not scale to zero, which means you always have an hourly expense on the database instance, while Neon does scale to zero.
  • Supported PostgreSQL versions: Neon’s support cycle is essentially ‘only the latest version of a PostgreSQL major release’, while AWS supports multiple minor releases for many PostgreSQL major releases. E.g., Neon currently only hosts 14.8 and 15.2, while in Aurora Serverless, you can select several minor versions of PostgreSQL.
  • Open source: If you find performance problems with Neon’s flavor of PostgreSQL, you could validate any issues on your own, while with Aurora, you would essentially be required to have someone else look at it, which requires an expensive support plan if you need it to happen ASAP.

In addition to that, we’re also looking into implementing a system that allows the user to provide their own extension, which is not something that Aurora Serverless (or most other managed PostgreSQL solutions) currently supports.

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