Background

The Neon codebase has a few decisions worth understanding because they shape almost everything else. This section captures them.

Pages

• Separation of compute and storage — the founding architectural choice.
• Postgres changes — what Neon patches in upstream Postgres and why.

Where to read more in repo

The repo has its own design-decision essays under docs/. The most relevant ones for this section are:

• docs/separation-compute-storage.md — short note linking to external presentations.
• docs/core_changes.md — exhaustive (~500 lines) list of upstream Postgres patches with rationale and "how to get rid of" notes for each.
• docs/synthetic-size.md — how Neon computes a tenant's billable size.
• docs/safekeeper-protocol.md — protocol design.
• docs/multitenancy.md — how the pageserver isolates many tenants.

External writeups that are linked from README.md:

• SELECT 'Hello, World' — high-level architecture blog post.
• Architecture decisions in Neon.
• The CMU Database Group seminar talk on Neon's storage system.