Barnes TechI recently wrote about Resend, a transactional email service I found that is focused on developers, and is really a fantastic tool. Today I wanted to mention another tool I’ve found that is really awesome.
Neon follows a similar philosophy and allows developers to create serverless PostgreSQL databases. Like Resend, this seems to be a service that is built on top of AWS technologies, but abstracts out a lot of the (in my opinion, dumb) technical overhead that accompanies all AWS services. It is shockingly easy to get set up and running with Neon, and there is a ton of flexibility on how your database will work, how many resources it will be allowed to pull from, and more.
I love how easy it is to create new users, roles, and even new databases, but some of the more advanced features really make Neon unique. For instance, they have a feature called “Branching”, where you can create a “branch” of your database either from a snapshot you save, or from the current database. Nearly instantly you have a second copy of your DB that you can use to test something out with.
There are lots of other features, like automatic snapshots, auto-scaling, and one-click read replicas. I also love how they help you generate credentials to connect from whatever project you are working on. For instance, I’m working on a Django project at the moment, and in Neon, I was able to just choose Django as a source, and it gave me the exact code to add the database to my Django project. Copy, paste, run the migration script, and it was done. I really was that simple.
I have seen several apps similar to this pop up lately, where they take something that one of the big cloud companies does, and specializes in just making it a really good experience, and I love it. More of this kind of thing please.
I have a couple more I will mention over the next few weeks, but I’m loving these.
