--- title: Architecture decisions in Neon | daily.dev description: Neon's engineering team explains the key architectural decisions behind building a serverless, cloud-native Postgres service. The core design separates storage... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/architecture-decisions-in-neon-uu7ci1zlf twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Architecture decisions in Neon | daily.dev og:description: Neon's engineering team explains the key architectural decisions behind building a serverless, cloud-native Postgres service. The core design separates storage... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/architecture-decisions-in-neon-uu7ci1zlf og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/Uu7CI1ZLf.png og:image:alt: Architecture decisions in Neon og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Architecture decisions in Neon **[Neon](https://daily.dev/sources/neontech)** · 11 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Neon's engineering team explains the key architectural decisions behind building a serverless, cloud-native Postgres service. The core design separates storage from compute, inspired by AWS Aurora but built open-source and Postgres-native. Key decisions include: building custom storage instead of using SANs or third-party filesystems; splitting the WAL service (safekeepers running consensus) from page servers; treating historical page versions the same as current data to enable cheap Point-in-Time Recovery; and using immutable, LSM-tree-inspired files offloaded to cloud object storage like S3 for durability and cost efficiency. The architecture enables branching, fast startup/shutdown, independent scaling of CPU and I/O, and PITR without expensive full restores. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [How Neon's lakebase architecture stays resilient to cloud failures](https://daily.dev/posts/how-neon-s-lakebase-architecture-stays-resilient-to-cloud-failures-j7quhswdh) · Neon · 6 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#postgresql](https://daily.dev/tags/postgresql), [#serverless](https://daily.dev/tags/serverless), [#distributed-systems](https://daily.dev/tags/distributed-systems) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/architecture-decisions-in-neon-uu7ci1zlf) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Architecture decisions in Neon","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/architecture-decisions-in-neon-uu7ci1zlf","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/architecture-decisions-in-neon-uu7ci1zlf"},"datePublished":"2026-07-09T06:57:44.986Z","dateModified":"2026-07-09T07:02:03.420Z","description":"Neon's engineering team explains the key architectural decisions behind building a serverless, cloud-native Postgres service. 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