Design Serverless Postgres (Separated Compute & Storage)

Problem Design Neon's core: serverless Postgres that separates compute from storage, scales to zero, and supports instant branching.

Functional requirements

• Stateless Postgres compute nodes.
• Durable, multi-tenant page storage reconstructed from the WAL.
• Scale compute to zero and resume fast.
• Instant copy-on-write branches.

Non-functional requirements

• Many databases, bursty usage.
• Fast cold resume.
• Durable, point-in-time recovery.

Areas to go deep

• Compute/storage separation with the WAL as source of truth.
• Page reconstruction by LSN and WAL durability.
• Scale-to-zero + fast resume, and copy-on-write branching / PITR.