I applied to neon last week and then the news broke about the acquisition. They rejected it this morning — I have never been happier to receive a rejection to an application.
This would’ve been three acquisitions straight for me and… I’m okay, they’re awful. I just want stability.
Congrats to the neon team! I use and love neon. Really hope this doesn’t change them too much.
tedivm · 46m ago
I got hired at Kenna Security a month before they were acquired by Cisco and it was such a miserable experience that I won't work for any company the Kenna leadership are involved with, nor would I ever consider working at Cisco.
flanked-evergl · 2h ago
Maybe unrelated but Databricks is the most annoying garbage I have ever had to use. It fascinates me how anyone uses it by choice.
robertkoss · 2h ago
I used to be a big fan of the platform because back in 2020 / 2021 it really was the only reasonable choice compared to AWS / Azure / Snowflake for building data platforms.
Today it suffers from feature creep and too many pivots & acquisitions. That they are insanely bad at naming features doesn't help either.
mritchie712 · 2h ago
Databricks started in 2013 when Spark sucked (it still does) and they aimed to make it better / faster (which they do).
The product is still centered Spark, but most companies don't want or need Spark and a combination of Iceberg and DuckDB will work for 95% of companies. It's cheaper, just as fast or faster and way easier to reason about.
We're building a data platform around that premise at Definite[0]. It includes everything you need to get started with data (ETL, BI, datalake).
Really hard disagree. Coming from hadoop, databricks is utopia. It's stable, fast, scales really well if you have massive datasets.
The biggest gripe in have is how crazy expensive it is.
willvarfar · 1h ago
Spark was a really big step up from hadoop.
But these days just use trino or whatever. There are lots of new ways to work on data that are all bigger steps up - ergonomically, performance and price - over spark as spark was over hadoop.
disgruntledphd2 · 24m ago
The nice thing about spark is the scala/python/R APIs. That helps to avoid lots of the irritating things about SQL (the same transformation applied to multiple columns is a big one).
isoprophlex · 2h ago
The market for IBM-like software and platforms (everyone else uses this! It must be good!) apparently wasn't saturated yet
apwell23 · 1h ago
Is hosting spark really that groundbreaking ? Also isn't spark kind of too complicated for 90% of enterprisey data-processing .
I really don't understand the valuation for this company. Why is it so high.
DarkWiiPlayer · 2h ago
With cookies disabled I get a blank website, which is a massive red flag and an immediate nope from me.
Can't imagine someone incapable of building a website would deliver a good (digital) product.
fkyoureadthedoc · 1h ago
They did build a website though. It even looks pretty nice. The restriction you've placed on yourself just prevents you from viewing it.
fuzzy_biscuit · 1h ago
But.. but.... we MUST track you! That's the whole purpose of our site /s
netvarun · 19m ago
Does anyone have insight into Neon's financials - specifically their revenue, COGS, and gross margins? I'm trying to understand what made Databricks value them at $1B. Was it strong unit economics, rapid growth, or mostly strategic/tech value?
acd10j · 2h ago
Databricks is Oracle-level bad. They will definitely ruin Neon or make it expensive. In the medium to long term, I will start looking for Neon alternatives.
bradhe · 1h ago
Definitely agree, their M&A strategy is setup to strangle whoever they buy and they don't even know it. They're struggling in the face of Iceberg, DuckDB and the other tectonic shifts happening in the open source world. They are trying to innovate through acquisition, but can't quite make it because their culture kills the companies they buy.
I'm biased, I'm a big-data-tech refugee (ex-Snowflake) and am working on https://tower.dev right now, but we're definitely seeing the open source trend supported by Iceberg. It'll be really interesting to see how this plays out.
higeorge13 · 2h ago
Congratz to neon team (i like what they built), but i don’t see the value or relation to databricks. I hope neon will continue as a standalone product, otherwise we lose a solid postgres provider from the market.
rockwotj · 49m ago
Its pretty heavy in Azure, so I would be surprised if it went away. This is DBX play to move into the transactional database space in addition to the analytical database.
presentation · 2h ago
They claim they will in the FAQ… but we know how this usually goes
Databricks in talks to acquire startup Neon for about $1B (174 comments)
Squarex · 2h ago
I’ve loved Neon and now I’m a little worried. Are there any alternatives?
tudorg · 2h ago
[Disclaimer: I work for Xata]
As it happens, we've just launched our new Xata platform (https://xata.io/) which has some of the key Neon features: instant copy-on-write branching and separation of storage and compute. As an extra twist, we also can do anonymization (PII masking) between your production database and developer branches.
The way we do copy-on-write branches is a bit different. We haven't done any modifications to Postgres but do it completely at the storage layer, which is a distributed system in itself. This also brings some I/O performance opportunities.
While Xata has been around for a while, we're just launching this new platform, and it is in Private Beta. But we are happy to work with you if you are interested.
(Disclaimer: I work at Xata.)
Just wanted to mention that we also support anonymization, in case that’s something you're looking into:
https://xata.io/postgres-data-masking
Hawxy · 1h ago
The PII masking aspect is very interesting and something we couldn't get when we decided on DBLab a month ago. What does the deployment model within AWS look like?
tudorg · 17m ago
If you want to deploy the whole platform inside your own AWS account, we have a Bring Your Own Cloud model: https://xata.io/byoc
If you want to get anonymization from your RDS/Aurora instance and into Xata branches, then you run only a CLI command (`xata clone`) which does something similar to pg_dump/pg_restore but with masking. It is based on our pgstream open source project.
Happy to organize a demo any time.
atombender · 2h ago
Is this open source? A major point of Neon is that it's open source and self-hostable.
tudorg · 1h ago
Several components are open source as their own projects (see below) which will allow you to reproduce most of the features on top of regular Postgres. But the storage part is not open source. We are considering a simpler implementation of it that would be realistic to self-host and still do copy-on-write branching.
These are the open source components:
* pgstream for the anonymization from the production branch
* pgroll for schema changes
* Xata Agent for the LLM-powered optimizations
atombender · 1h ago
I think when people look at Neon, the Aurora-style disaggregated compute/data architecture allowing highly scalable read replicas on cloud storage is the defining feature, and it's the only such project that offers it for Postgres. So the storage part is the point.
1st1 · 3m ago
geldata.com
Hawxy · 1h ago
If all you care about is the forking aspect we use DBLab Engine pretty effectively: https://postgres.ai/products/dblab_engine. Gets deployed within your own infrastructure.
Hey everyone, I'm an engineer at Neon and I wanted to share this FAQ which covers a lot of the questions that are being brought up in the comments here:
We're really excited about this, and will try to respond to some of the questions people have here later.
joshstrange · 36m ago
That’s a nice FAQ and all but after what happened to bit.io [0] you have to understand why people (like me) are extremely worried about this.
We’ve all read glowing blog posts and reassuring FAQs enough times after an acquisition only to see a
complete about-face a few months or a year later.
I quite enjoyed using Neon but as a solo founder running my business on Neon I can’t help but think it’s insanity to not be looking for alternatives.
Databricks is _not_ a company I trust at all.
[0] if you don’t know, databricks acquired bit.io and shut down all databases within 30 days. Production databases had <30 days to migrate.
felixrydberg · 1h ago
Will there be a statement about the OSS nature of Neon?
tristan957 · 1h ago
I'm also an engineer at Neon. The plan is to continue developing Neon as an Apache-2.0 licensed software.
jenny91 · 32m ago
It's my understanding that Neon had some tech to basically "wake up" the DB when a request came out -- so you could "scale down to zero," if you will. I was hoping to explore this for small personal projects: I by far prefer Postgres and would love an isolated database per project.
Is there an alternative for that? Scale-to-zero postgres, basically?
ko_pivot · 29m ago
AWS Aurora Postgres Serverless v2 has that capability, though it takes multiple seconds.
ajc23 · 12m ago
[Neon employee] p99 for Neon compute start is 500ms
timmg · 2h ago
I remember the first post by the Neon team here on HN. I think I commented at the time that I thought it was a great idea. I’ve never had a need to use them yet, but thought I always would.
Cynically, am I the only one who takes pause because of an acquisition like this? It worries me that they will need to be more focused on the needs of their new owners, rather than their users. In theory, the needs should align — but I’m not sure it usually works out that way in practice.
avinassh · 2h ago
> I remember the first post by the Neon team here on HN. I think I commented at the time that I thought it was a great idea.
Same! I remember it too. I found it quite fascinating. Separation of storage and compute was something new to me, and I was asking them about Pageserver [0]. I also asked for career advice on how to get into database development [1].
Two years later, I ended up working on very similar disaggregated storage at Turso database.
Taking a pause also... I don't believe serving IA can be aligned to serving devs. I hope that the part of the work related to the core of PostgreSQL will help the community.
foota · 39m ago
So... As someone who's joining databricks in a few weeks, what's with the hate in the comments?
datadrivenangel · 7m ago
It's big, enterprise, and competes aggressively on marketing and hype. Also there have been a string of acquisitions where databricks has kind of just absorbed the team and product and then not done a great job for customers of the old company.
It's fine. Probably actually a good place to work.
kjuulh · 2h ago
Congratulations to the Neon team.
To be honest this is a little sad for me. I'd hoped that Neon would be able to fill the vacuum left by CockroachDB going "business source"
Being bought by DataBricks makes Neon far less interesting to me. I simply don't trust such a large organisation that has previously had issues acquiring companies, to really care about what is pretty much the most important infrastructure I've got.
There certainly is enough demand for a more "modern" postgresql, but pretty much all of the direct alternatives are straying far from its roots. Whether it be pricing, compatibility, source available etc.
Back when I was looking at alternatives to postgres these were considered:
1. AWS RDS: We were already on AWS RDS, but it is expensive, and has scaling and operations issues
2. AWS Aurora: The one that ended up being recommended, solved some operations issues, but came with other niche downsides. Pretty much the same downsides as other wire compatible postgresql alternatives
3. CockroachDB: Was very interesting, wire compatible, but had deeper compatibility issues, was open source at the time, it didn't fit with our tooling
4. Neon: Was considered to be too immature at the time, but certainly interesting, looked to be able to solve most of our challenges, maybe except for some of the operations problems with postgresql, I didn't look deeper into it at the time
5. Yugabyte: interesting technology, had some of the same compatibility issues, but less that the others, as they're also using the query engine from postgresql as far as I can tell.
There are also various self hosting utilities for PostgreSQL I looked at, specifically CloudPG, but we didn't have the resources to maintain a stateful deployment of kubernetes and postgres ourselves. It would fulfill most of our requirements, but with extra maintenance burden, both for Kubernetes and PostgreSQL.
Hosting PostgreSQL by itself, didn't have mature enough replication and operations features by itself at that point. It is steadily maturing, but as we'd got many databases manual upgrades and patches would be very time consuming, as PostgreSQL has some not so nice upgrade quirks. You basically have to unload and reload all data during major upgrades. Unless you use extensions and other services to circumvent this issue.
tuukkah · 1h ago
> 5. Yugabyte: interesting technology, had some of the same compatibility issues, but less that the others, as they're also using the query engine from postgresql as far as I can tell.
Neon is Postgres.
kjuulh · 54m ago
That is why I was hopeful for Neon unlike a lot of the other ones. Yugabyte however isn't just postgres.
phrotoma · 2h ago
> same downsides as other wire compatible postgresql alternatives
I'm interested if you'd care to elaborate.
kjuulh · 53m ago
Mainly in relation to notify/listen and advisory locks. Most of our code bases use advisory lock based migration tools. It would be a large lift moving to an alternative or building a migration scheduler out of process
bittermandel · 2h ago
Big congratulations!
I really do hope that their OSS strategy does not change due to this, as it's really friendly to people who want to learn their product and run smaller deployments. It's (intentionally or not) really hard to run at a big scale as the control plane is not open-source, which makes the model actually work.
anentropic · 1h ago
How do they know 80% of Neon databases are created by AI agents?
davidgomes · 1h ago
We can see which database creations are coming from products such as Replit, v0, Same.new, Create.xyz, and a few more etc.
Surely, there might be other agents creating Neon databases so we might be under-counting.
presentation · 2h ago
Guess this is the beginning of the end of a great service, not holding my breath. Sounds like from the WSJ article that they’ll just become some AI agent backend service for Replit, and from the previous conversation on HN that Databricks ruins and shutters their acquisitions. Congrats on the big payout for the employees, though.
Crazy how big the data ecosystem has grown. Congrats to the Neon team on a good outcome, but good luck integrating into DBX culture and surviving.
I'm seeing a lot of DBX hate in this thread overall. I think it's warranted. At Tower[0], we're trying to provide a decent open solution. It stars with owning your own data, and Iceberg helps you break free.
At first I thought it had something do to with arm64 SIMD instructions.
anshumankmr · 1h ago
What happens to existing customers of Neon?
joshstrange · 45m ago
Ask the bit.io customers….
Most likely a holding state for a bit before databricks ruins it or shuts it down. I started looking around when the news broke last week or so for alternatives.
bootsmann · 2h ago
The Databricks vs. Snowflake bidding war is probably an insanely good time to be a database startup.
joshstrange · 50m ago
I’m incredibly disappointed by this news. I really enjoyed Neon but I seriously doubt I’m going to like Databricks’ stewardship if it. And that’s if they even still care about catering to people like me and don’t jack the prices us.
I guess it’s time to go back to the well of managed/serverless Postgres options…
whobre · 2h ago
A VC funded company that has never been profitable spending a billion on another startup…
This would’ve been three acquisitions straight for me and… I’m okay, they’re awful. I just want stability.
Congrats to the neon team! I use and love neon. Really hope this doesn’t change them too much.
Today it suffers from feature creep and too many pivots & acquisitions. That they are insanely bad at naming features doesn't help either.
The product is still centered Spark, but most companies don't want or need Spark and a combination of Iceberg and DuckDB will work for 95% of companies. It's cheaper, just as fast or faster and way easier to reason about.
We're building a data platform around that premise at Definite[0]. It includes everything you need to get started with data (ETL, BI, datalake).
0 - https://www.definite.app/
The biggest gripe in have is how crazy expensive it is.
But these days just use trino or whatever. There are lots of new ways to work on data that are all bigger steps up - ergonomically, performance and price - over spark as spark was over hadoop.
I really don't understand the valuation for this company. Why is it so high.
Can't imagine someone incapable of building a website would deliver a good (digital) product.
I'm biased, I'm a big-data-tech refugee (ex-Snowflake) and am working on https://tower.dev right now, but we're definitely seeing the open source trend supported by Iceberg. It'll be really interesting to see how this plays out.
WSJ article: https://www.wsj.com/articles/databricks-to-buy-startup-neon-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43899016
Databricks in talks to acquire startup Neon for about $1B (174 comments)
As it happens, we've just launched our new Xata platform (https://xata.io/) which has some of the key Neon features: instant copy-on-write branching and separation of storage and compute. As an extra twist, we also can do anonymization (PII masking) between your production database and developer branches.
The way we do copy-on-write branches is a bit different. We haven't done any modifications to Postgres but do it completely at the storage layer, which is a distributed system in itself. This also brings some I/O performance opportunities.
While Xata has been around for a while, we're just launching this new platform, and it is in Private Beta. But we are happy to work with you if you are interested.
Btw, congrats to the Neon team!
(Disclaimer: I work at Xata.) Just wanted to mention that we also support anonymization, in case that’s something you're looking into: https://xata.io/postgres-data-masking
If you want to get anonymization from your RDS/Aurora instance and into Xata branches, then you run only a CLI command (`xata clone`) which does something similar to pg_dump/pg_restore but with masking. It is based on our pgstream open source project.
Happy to organize a demo any time.
These are the open source components:
* pgstream for the anonymization from the production branch
* pgroll for schema changes
* Xata Agent for the LLM-powered optimizations
https://neon.tech/databricks-faq
We're really excited about this, and will try to respond to some of the questions people have here later.
We’ve all read glowing blog posts and reassuring FAQs enough times after an acquisition only to see a complete about-face a few months or a year later.
I quite enjoyed using Neon but as a solo founder running my business on Neon I can’t help but think it’s insanity to not be looking for alternatives.
Databricks is _not_ a company I trust at all.
[0] if you don’t know, databricks acquired bit.io and shut down all databases within 30 days. Production databases had <30 days to migrate.
Is there an alternative for that? Scale-to-zero postgres, basically?
Cynically, am I the only one who takes pause because of an acquisition like this? It worries me that they will need to be more focused on the needs of their new owners, rather than their users. In theory, the needs should align — but I’m not sure it usually works out that way in practice.
Same! I remember it too. I found it quite fascinating. Separation of storage and compute was something new to me, and I was asking them about Pageserver [0]. I also asked for career advice on how to get into database development [1].
Two years later, I ended up working on very similar disaggregated storage at Turso database.
Congrats to the Neon team!
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31756671
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31756510
It's fine. Probably actually a good place to work.
To be honest this is a little sad for me. I'd hoped that Neon would be able to fill the vacuum left by CockroachDB going "business source"
Being bought by DataBricks makes Neon far less interesting to me. I simply don't trust such a large organisation that has previously had issues acquiring companies, to really care about what is pretty much the most important infrastructure I've got.
There certainly is enough demand for a more "modern" postgresql, but pretty much all of the direct alternatives are straying far from its roots. Whether it be pricing, compatibility, source available etc.
Back when I was looking at alternatives to postgres these were considered:
1. AWS RDS: We were already on AWS RDS, but it is expensive, and has scaling and operations issues
2. AWS Aurora: The one that ended up being recommended, solved some operations issues, but came with other niche downsides. Pretty much the same downsides as other wire compatible postgresql alternatives
3. CockroachDB: Was very interesting, wire compatible, but had deeper compatibility issues, was open source at the time, it didn't fit with our tooling
4. Neon: Was considered to be too immature at the time, but certainly interesting, looked to be able to solve most of our challenges, maybe except for some of the operations problems with postgresql, I didn't look deeper into it at the time
5. Yugabyte: interesting technology, had some of the same compatibility issues, but less that the others, as they're also using the query engine from postgresql as far as I can tell.
There are also various self hosting utilities for PostgreSQL I looked at, specifically CloudPG, but we didn't have the resources to maintain a stateful deployment of kubernetes and postgres ourselves. It would fulfill most of our requirements, but with extra maintenance burden, both for Kubernetes and PostgreSQL.
Hosting PostgreSQL by itself, didn't have mature enough replication and operations features by itself at that point. It is steadily maturing, but as we'd got many databases manual upgrades and patches would be very time consuming, as PostgreSQL has some not so nice upgrade quirks. You basically have to unload and reload all data during major upgrades. Unless you use extensions and other services to circumvent this issue.
Neon is Postgres.
I'm interested if you'd care to elaborate.
I really do hope that their OSS strategy does not change due to this, as it's really friendly to people who want to learn their product and run smaller deployments. It's (intentionally or not) really hard to run at a big scale as the control plane is not open-source, which makes the model actually work.
Surely, there might be other agents creating Neon databases so we might be under-counting.
I'm seeing a lot of DBX hate in this thread overall. I think it's warranted. At Tower[0], we're trying to provide a decent open solution. It stars with owning your own data, and Iceberg helps you break free.
[0] - https://tower.dev
Most likely a holding state for a bit before databricks ruins it or shuts it down. I started looking around when the news broke last week or so for alternatives.
I guess it’s time to go back to the well of managed/serverless Postgres options…