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Databricks in talks to acquire startup Neon for about $1B
- senderista 1y agoAWS just breathed a huge sigh of relief at the neutralization of Aurora's most dangerous competitor.
- datadrivenangel 1y agoDatabricks is trying hard to get into serverless, but it seems like they refuse to allow it to actually be cheaper, which defeats the purpose of serverless.
- thrance 1y agoI don't think being cheaper is the main value sell of serverless. When I hear "serverless" I think "ease of deployment and automatic scaling".
- whateveracct 1y agoRight but ultimately that's a cost thing, right? Because you can solve those problems through other means and by hiring internally. Serverless is meant to obviate some of that. But it is less compelling when the vendor tries to gobble up that margin for themselves.
- sitkack 1y agoYou will all forced to go serverless because new grads can't use the command line. Running a database is about the hardest thing you can do. If it is serverless, you don't need special skills, preventing employees from becoming valuable lowers costs across the board.
- vhcr 1y agoHave you tried being less jaded? Running a database is NOT about the hardest thing you can do.
- sitkack 1y agoWhen running a service, databases are the hardest to run. K8S still doesn't handle them well (this is by design), so they are the first thing to get outsourced to a managed service. This is me being less jaded. Support those little wins!
- whstl 1y agoServerless is incredibly cheap for endpoints that don't get called too often, and incredibly expensive for endpoints that are. I guess different people just have different experiences.
- programmertote 1y agoI had an interview with a senior data engineering candidate and we were talking about how expensive Databricks can get. :D I set up specific budget alerts in Azure just for Databricks resources in DEV and PROD environments.
- viccis 1y agoThere are so many gotchas. I'm getting so tired of working around it, but my company is all in on serverless so the pain will continue. A lot of it is tied up with Unity Catalog shortcomings, but Serverless and UC are basically joined at the hip. A few just off the top of my head: * You can't .persist() DataFrames in serverless. Some of my work involves long pipelines that wind up with relatively small DFs at the end of them, but need to do several things with that DF. Nowhere near as easy as just caching it. * Handling object storage mounted to Unity Catalog can be a nightmare. If you want to support multiple types of Databricks platforms (AWS, Azure, Google, etc.), then you will have to deal with the fact that you can't mount one type's object storage with another. If you're on Azure Databricks, you can't access S3 via Unity Catalog. * There's no API to get metrics like how much memory or CPU was consumed for a given job. If you want to handle monitoring and alerting on it yourself, you're out of luck. * For some types of Serverless compute, startup times from cold can be 1 minute or more. They're getting better, but Databricks is an endless progression of unpleasant surprises and being told "oh no you can't do it that way", especially compared to Snowflake, whose business Databricks has been working to chew away at for a while. Their Variant type is a great example. It's so much more limited than Snowflake's that I'm still learning new and arbitrary ways in which it's incompatible with Snowflake's implementation.
- avg_dev 1y agohmm, what is a serverless Pg? I don't quite understand. I thought you needed a database server if you wanted to run Pg.
- mohon 1y agobasically they separate the compute and storage into different components, where the traditional PG use both compute and storage at the same server. because of this separation, the compute (e.q SQL parsing, etc) can be scaled independently and the storage can also do the same, which for example use AWS S3 so if your SQL query is CPU heavy, then Neon can just add more "compute" nodes while the "storage" cluster remain the same to me, this is similar to what the usual microservice where you have a API service and DB. the difference is Neon is purposely running DB on top of that structure
- fock 1y agoSo how is this distributed Postgres still an ACID-compliant database? If you allow multiple nodes to query the same data this likely is just Trino/an OLAP-tool using Postgres syntax? Or did they rebuild Postgres and not upstream anything?
- mohon 1y agoThey keep using the core Postgre while they touch the storage layer to works with S3. Can try ro read more here https://jack-vanlightly.com/analyses/2023/11/15/neon-serverless-postgresql-asds-chapter-3 https://jack-vanlightly.com/analyses/2023/11/15/neon-serverl...
- newfocogi 1y agoThey offer serverless Postgres. Here's a link if anyone else needs it https://neon.tech/ https://neon.tech/
- gopalv 1y agoAn OLTP solution fixes a lot of the headaches about the traditional extract-load-transform steps. Mostly a lot of OLAP starts when the data loads in Kafka logs or a disk of some sort. Then you schedule a task or keep a task polling this constantly, which is always prone to small failures & delays or big failures when schema changes up. The "data pipeline" team exists because the data doesn't move by itself from where it is first stored to where it is ready for deep analysis. If you can directly push 1-row updates transactionally to a system and feed off the backend to write a more OLAP friendly structure, then you can hookup things like a car rental service's operational logs into a system which can compute more complex things like forecasting of availability or apply discounts to give a customer an upgrade for cheap. Neon looks a lot better than YugaByte in tech (which also talks postgres protocols) and a lot nicer in protocol compatibility than something like FoundationDB. Alloy from Google feels somewhat similar, Spanner has a postgres interface too. The postgres API is a great abstraction common point, even if the actual details of the implementations vary a lot.
- clpm4j 1y agoI've been seriously considering neon for a new application. This definitely gives me pause... maybe plain ol' Postgres is going to be the winner for me again.
- jedberg 1y agoWhy would this give you pause? You just don't want the data to be where Databricks is? Either way, there are plenty of other serverless Postgres options out there, Supabase being one of the most popular.
- MOARDONGZPLZ 1y agoCan’t speak for anyone but myself and my experience anecdotally, having used Databricks: I consider them to be the Oracle of the modern era. Under no circumstances would I let them get their hooks into any company I have the power from preventing it.
- thor24 1y agoWhy do think so? Databricks notebook product I have used in couple of companies is pretty solid. I have done any google research but they are generally known to be very high talent dense kind of place to work.
- sitkack 1y agoYou and the parent are not talking about the same things.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- clpm4j 1y agoThis is exactly how I feel. I do not want to be in the Databricks ecosystem.
- omneity 1y ago
- jmull 1y agoWow, $1B. I've been bullish on neon for a while -- the idea hits exactly the right spot, IMO, and their execution looks good in my limited experience. But I mean that from a technical perspective. I never have any real idea about the business -- do they have an edge that makes people want to start paying them money and keep paying them money? Heck if I know. I guess that's going to be Databricks problem now (maybe).
- xyst 1y agoActual revenue is irrelevant. This is a business decision to corner the market.
- blitzar 1y agoNo, no no no, no revenue. Why would you go after revenue? Pre-revenue pure play. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo
- brap 1y agoI'm sorry but what is "the idea"? Managed postgres? It seems like execution >>> idea in this case
- jmull 1y agoMore specifically, the idea is "serverless" posgres. But as I mentioned, I mean from a tech standpoint... If you're interested, they've posted various things about how the tech works. > It seems like execution >>> idea in this case I don't know what >>> means here, so possibly I complete agree or perhaps completely disagree.
- __s 1y ago>>> means "way better than"
- jordan1212k 1y ago
- outside1234 1y agoOk, can we just. How is Databricks an AI unicorn exactly?
- ivape 1y agoEnterprises have lots of data. They store it somewhere, and there are multiple vendors that provide such "credible" infrastructure for this type of storage. Think of it like, your dad says he's willing to get a dog, but only trusts these-five-animal-shelters and nothing else. That doesn't mean that's correct (that those are the only places to get a dog), it just means that's what he trusts. Databricks is most likely a unicorn because they have successfully sold the idea that they are one of those trusted vendors, like Snowflake. The truth of the 2010s up until now is that every startup was a massive sales con job. The wealth of this industry is not truly built on incredible tech, but on the audacity of salesmanship. It's a billion-dollar con job. That's one of the reasons I take every ridiculous startup that launches quite seriously, because you have no idea just how audacious their sales people are. They can sell anything. Your question is very fundamental, and the answer is just as raw and fundamental too. I would love it if some of these sales people actually reform and write tell-alls about how they conned so many large companies in their years of working. This content has got to be out there somewhere.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- woooooo 1y agoSo, I'm not sure if this is less cynical or more cynical, but.. have you ever talked to the decision-makers who buy something like databricks? They can't build it themselves, and it's highly dubious that they'd be able to hire and supervise someone to build it. Databricks may be selling "nothing special", but it's needed, and the buyers can't build it themselves.
- th0ma5 1y agoIs that how Databricks sees their customers? Yikes
- joshstrange 1y agoWell this isn't great news. I quite enjoy using Neon but I doubt it's going to continue to cater to people like me if it's bought by Databricks (from the little I know about them and from looking at their website). Thankfully, I just need "Postgres", I wasn't depending on any other features so I can migrate easily if things start going south.
- thiagoeh 1y agoLooks like the acquihire of Bit.io in 2023 wasn't enough to be able to deliver their own OLTP offering https://blog.bit.io/whats-next-for-bit-io-joining-databricks-ace9a40bce0d https://blog.bit.io/whats-next-for-bit-io-joining-databricks... https://www.databricks.com/blog/welcoming-bit-io-databricks-investing-developer-experience https://www.databricks.com/blog/welcoming-bit-io-databricks-... Or it's just a business decision to corner the market, as someone else said
- mcmcmc 1y ago> Or it's just a business decision to corner the market, as someone else said Given how lax antitrust enforcement is, probably this
- klabb3 1y agoThey aren’t exactly hiding it. I kept my eye on bit.io because they looked very promising. Next day, gone. Shut down immediately. Something is fucky with the investment pipeline because it’s not ”worth” that much on its own, it’s a market dominance play, bad for innovation..
- timenova 1y agoOkay now I am concerned. We're using Neon. We can move easily at this point, but I'm sure they have huge customers storing many terabytes of data where this may be genuinely hard to do. I went to Archive.org and figured out that in 2023, they announced they were shutting down on May 30th, all databases shutdown on June 30th, only available for downloads after that, and deleted on July 30th.
- joshstrange 1y agoSame boat here. Not really looking to have to move but I'm incredibly thankful that I never integrated with Neon more than using Postgres. I don't depend on/need their API or other branching features. I hate that this is what I've become, I want to try some of the cool features "postgres++" providers offer but I actively avoid most features fearing the potential future migration. I got burned using the Data API on Aurora Serverless and then leaving them and having to rewrite a bunch of code.
- markus_zhang 1y agoI'm confused. I saw users left Databricks left and right. Two companies I worked for previously got out of it due to cost. Do they still have a lot of $$$?
- hgontijo 1y agohttps://www.databricks.com/company/newsroom/press-releases/databricks-raising-10b-series-j-investment-62b-valuation https://www.databricks.com/company/newsroom/press-releases/d...
- markus_zhang 1y agoThanks. OK they still have a lot of money.
- yalogin 1y agoA tangential question here, will Databricks ever go public? At this point it's a large company making billion dollar acquisitions. For someone looking to join the company, I cannot imagine IPO to be a motivation anymore.
- kyawzazaw 1y agothey can do employee liquidity event
- yalogin 1y agoThat is not the same as an IPO right?
- manquer 1y agoNo, basically it is a buy back of employee options and stock . Many companies raise money only to give liquidity to founders / employees and some early investors even if they don’t money for operations at all. While Databricks is large , there are much bigger companies which would have IPOed at smaller sizes in the past which are delaying (may never do) today. Stripe and SpaceX are the biggest examples both have healthy positive cash flows but don’t feel the value of going public . Buying back shares and options is the only route if you don’t have IPO plans if you want to keep early stage employees happy
- hgontijo 1y agoCompany offers to purchase employee pre-ipo shares.
- VirusNewbie 1y agoWhy does it matter if you get liquidity events 2-4x per year
- manquer 1y agoLater stage things are , the potential IPO is a benefit not deterrent. Recruiters and hiring managers will hint at potential IPO being not far off as an incentive to join. It minimizes risk, they do same for potential target’s founders like Neon here . This is better than earlier stage startups , while you get far better multiples , it is also quite possible that you are let go somewhere into the cycle without the money to vest the options for tax reasons and there is short vesting period on exit. For this reason companies these days offer 5/10 yr post leaving as a more favorable offer —— For founders it is gives them a shorter window to a exit than on their own, and in revenue light and tech heavy startup like neon (compared to databricks) the value risk is reduced because stock they get in acquisition is based on real revenue and growth not early stage product traction as neon would be today . They also have some cash component which is usually enough to buy core things in most founders look at like buying a house in few million range or closing mortgages or invest in few early stage projects directly or through funds
- forgetfulness 1y agoWhat is the lowdown on Databricks? Their bread and butter were hosted Spark and notebooks. As tasks done in Spark over a data lake began to be delegated wholesale to columnar store ELT, they tried to pivot to "lake houses", then I sort of lost track of them after I got out of Spark myself. Did Delta Lake ever catch on? Where are they going now?
- richardw 1y agoCapture enterprise AI enthusiasm by providing a 1-stop shop for data and AI, optionally hosted on your own cloud tenant. Keep deploying functionality so clients never need another supplier. Partner with SAP, OpenAI, anyone who holds market share. Buy anyone that either helps growth or might help a competitor grow. Enterprise view: delegate AI environment to Databricks unless you’re a real player. Market is too chaotic, so rely on them to keep your innovation pipeline fed. Focus on building your own core data and AI within their environment. Nobody got fired for choosing Databricks.
- jimbokun 1y agoCan someone translate this to non-CEO speak?
- baggiponte 1y agoYou basically pay databricks a “fee” to choose the more appropriate and modern stack for you to build on, and keep it up to date. Never used it, but it handles with lots of the administrative bs (compliance, SLAs, idk) for you so you can just ship.
- janderson215 1y ago[flagged]
- forgetfulness 1y agoThat does sound, as you allude, like IBM on its long downward spiral of globbing up products to stay relevant and touting them as an integral solution, while in-house development stuck to keeping legacy products alive for their Enterprise contracts. I wonder if they'll be foolish enough to start doing consulting around them, obliterating their economies of scale in the process; so far they are going with the "consulting partners" approach. Oh well. Databricks notebooks were hella cool back when companies were willing to spend lavishly on having engineers write cloud hosted Scala in the first place, and at premium prices to boot.
- chachra 1y agoHope they don't increase the price!!
- kelnos 1y agoI'd be more worried that they'd shut it down...
- 999900000999 1y agoSupabase just raised 200 million. What’s with all these Postgres hosting services being worth so much now? Someone at AWS probably thought about this, easy to provision serverless Postgres, and they just didn’t build it. I’m still looking for something that can generate types and spit it out in a solid sdk. It’s amazing this isn’t a solved problem. A long long time ago, I was apart of a team trying to sort this out. I’m tempted to hit up my old CEO and ask him what he thinks. The company is long gone… If anything we tried to do way too much with a fraction of the funding. In a hypothetical almost movie like situation I wouldn’t hesitate to rejoin my old colleagues. The issue then, as is today is applications need backends. But building backends is boring, tedious and difficult. Maybe a NoSql DB that “understands” the Postgres API?
- _bohm 1y ago"Easy to provision" is mostly a strategic feature for acquiring new users/customers. The more difficult parts of building a database platform are reliability and performance, and it can take a long time to establish a reputation for having these qualities. There's a reason why most large enterprises stick to the hyperscalers for their mission-critical workloads.
- investa 1y agoThat reason also includes SOC2, FedRAMP, data at rest jurisdiction, availability zones etc. And if large enough you can negotiate the standard pricing.
- _bohm 1y agoFor sure. And oftentimes these less sexy features or certifications are much more cumbersome to implement/acquire than the flashy stuff these startups lead with
- investa 1y agoBuilding backends is easy. It is sort of weird. In 2003 no one would bat an eyelid at building an entire app and chucking it on a server. I guess front-end complexity had made that a specialism so with all that dev energy drained they have no time for the backend. The backend is substantial easier though! These high value startups timed well to capture the vibe coding (was known as builidng an MVP before), front end culture and sheer volume of internet use and developers.
- taw1285 1y agoI am fairly new to all this data pipeline services (Databricks, Snowflakes etc). Say right now I have an e-commerce site with 20K MAU. All metrics are going to Amplitude and we can use that to see DAU, retention, and purchase volume. At what point in my startup lifecycle do we need to enlist the services?
- speakfreely 1y agoA non-trivial portion of my consulting work over the past 10 years has been working on data pipelines at various big corporations that move absurdly small amounts of data around using big data tools like spark. I would not worry about purchasing services from Databricks, but I would definitely try to poach their sales people if you can.
- jimbokun 1y agoWhich is also a reason to not use Databricks, as they will cost your company money by selling gullible users things they don’t need.
- emmelaich 1y agoI'm aware of a govt agency with a few hundred gb of data using Mongo, Databricks and were being pushed towards Snowflake as well. Boggles the mind.
- lizard 1y agoJust curious, what would you consider, "absurdly small amounts of data around using big data tools like spark" and what do you recommend instead? I recently worked on some data pipelines with Databricks notebooks ala Azure Fabric. I'm currently using ~30% of our capacity and starting to get pushback to run things less frequently to reduce the load. I'm not convinced I actually need Fabric here, but the value for me has been its the first time the company has been able to provision a platform that can handle the data at all. I have a small portion of it running into a datbase as well which has been constant complaints about volume. At this point I can't tell if we just have unrealistic expectations about the costs of having this data that everyone wants, or if our data engineers are just completely out of touch with the current state of the industry, so Fabric is just the cost we have to pay to keep up.
- User23 1y agoMeanwhile here I am wondering why everyone isn’t using SQLite.
- HWR_14 1y agoI thought SQLite's use case was for a single-user local database.
- 0x6c6f6c 1y agoMore like "single process application's database". There are interesting use cases for DB-per-user which can be server or client side, or litestream's continuous backup/sync that can extend it beyond this use case a bit too. You _can_ use SQLite as your service's sole database, if you vertically scale it up and the load isn't too much. It'll handle a reasonable amount of traffic. Once you hit that ceiling though, you'll have to rethink your architecture, and undergo some kind of migration. The common argument for SQLite is deferring complexity of hosting until you've actually reached the type of load you have to use a more complex stack for.
- jimbokun 1y agoIf you can serve all your traffic by a single instance running Sqlite in same process as your application, have at it. If you need to serve your dats across a network to many clients, managing that with SQLite is much trickier.
- beoberha 1y agoCongrats to the Neon team - they make an awesome product. That’s about all the good I can say here. I don’t blame them for selling out. It’s always felt like a “when” not an “if”. I would be surprised if you can make money selling cloud databases - especially when funded by VCs.
- anshumankmr 1y agoGreat.As someone using Neon, how might this impact me? Price bumps?
- joshstrange 1y agoI'd be most concerned with Neon being shut down. That's what Databricks did to bit.io (another serverless Postgres provider they bought). I'm really not looking forward to a migration.
- crowcroft 1y agoIf I'm guessing this either: 1. An acquihire (if your a Neon customer this would probably be a bad outcome for you). 2. A growth play. Neon will be positioned as an 'application layer' product offered cheap to bring SaaS startups into the ecosystem. As those growth startups grow and need more services sell them everything else.
- aurareturn 1y agoWho pays $1b for an acquihire?
- crowcroft 1y agoCharacter AI is the only one I can think of. Although point taken, there must be more going on than a pure acquihire.
- wqtz 1y agoDatabricks acquired bit.io and subsequently shut it down quite fast. Afaik bit.io had a very small team and the founder was a serial entrepreneur who is not going to stick around and he did not. I am not sure who from bit.io is still around at databricks. If I am guessing right, Motherduck will likely be acquired by GCP because most of the founding team was ex-BQ. Snowflake purchased Modin and polars is still quite immature to be acquisition ready. So, what does this leave us with. There is also EDB who is competing in enterprise Postgres space. Folks I know in the industry are not very happy with databricks. Databricks themselves was hinting people that that they would be potentially acquired by Azure as Azure tries to compete in the data warehouse space. But everyone become an AI company which left Databricks in an awkward space. Their bdev team is not bestest from my limited interactions with them (lots of starbucks drinkers and let me get back to you after a 3 month PTO), so they do not know who or how to lead them to an AI pivot. With cash to burn from overinvestment and the snowflake/databricks conf coming up fast they needed a big announcement and this is that big announcement. Should have sobered up before writing this though. But who cares.
- arccy 1y agostarbucks drinkers is certainly a new way to describe people, though i'm not sure what image that's supposed to invoke
- ethbr1 1y agoFrom context in parent, I'm reading as the sort of person who looks more competent than they are and skates from job to job quickly enough that no one notices.
- joshuanapoli 1y agoMaybe they mean the kind of biz dev that uses small bribes (a free drink at Starbucks) to help get customers to take their call.
- tomrod 1y ago
- ashvardanian 1y agoOf all the billion-scale investment and acquisition news of the last 24 hours this is the only one that makes sense. Especially after the record-breaking $15B round, that Databricks closed last year.
- briandear 1y agoNeon is awesome. I hope Databricks doesn’t brick it.
- esadek 1y agoI migrated to Neon from bit.io after Databricks acquired and sunset it. Really hope I won't have to migrate again.
- betteryet 1y agoNeon is a great product because they are run by Postgres enthusiasts. They have decent customer-friendly pricing, real serverless HTTP endpoints, and they're always on the latest version of Postgres as soon as it is stable. From what I can tell, no other provider has this positioning, driven by dedication. I really hope they can maintain this dedication after acquisition, but Databricks will probably push them into enterprise and it will lose the spark. I wish Cloudflare bought them instead.
- impulser_ 1y agoThese Postgres, and serverless databases are all so overhyped. I have tried all of them and they all are much slower than just deploying a managed database in the same datacenter as your application. I have an application deployed on Railway with a Postgres database and the user's latency is consistent 150ms. The same application deployed on these serverless/edge provider is anywhere between 300-400ms with random spikes to 800ms. The same application, same data, and same query. The edge and serverless has to be the biggest scam in cloud industry right now. They aren't faster, and they aren't cheaper. You could argue they are easier to scale, but that not he case anymore since everyone provides autoscaling now.
- mritchie712 1y agosupabase lured me in with built-in oauth, real-time, and some nice client side features in their JS lib, but I do worry about the latency sometimes. It'd be a lot of work to run an apples to apples test with a Google Cloud Postgres db vs. Supabase and see what the difference is.
- cpursley 1y agoWhatever. I was able to set up Neon Postgres in 5 mins. It’s still crazy fast with my Fly services, has replication out of the box and backups. Much easier than AWS and from what I can tell, getting something going with Railway. And I don’t have to worry about operating it. My time is valuable.
- mbreese 1y agoAll of that can be true. What I wonder is — if that all is true — how much of a moat is there around that? It seems like the secret sauce in that company isn’t some custom technology, it’s execution. Execution can be replicated by another competent team. Or is there some other secret sauce that I can’t see?
- datadrivenangel 1y agoExecution is some of the hardest secret sauce of all
- AbstractH24 1y agoAnyone notice a rapid ramp up in acquisitions? As though folks are looking for exits but IPO isn’t an option. Think we’re approaching a reckoning for lots of companies that raised circa 2021 at valuations that are no longer plausible and AI startups. Oh, and ones in the first group that tried to rebrand as the second…
- matt-p 1y agoNeon is a interesting product and they've got some great Postgres engineers. Having said that 1 Second cold starts are still quite painful for a website/web app. I hope the $19 plans are there to stay - but I somewhat doubt it.
- clarkbw 1y agocold starts are 500ms on average, and that's only for the first call that wakes up the db from hibernation. people still seem to think that this latency happens for every call (see other threads here) but once the service has woken up (cold start over) you're back to regular (sub 10ms) latency timings and the service continues to run that way. you'll only hit a cold start again if (you have this option turned on) your service goes idle for > 5 min. You can turn scale-to-zero off and you'll run 24/7, have zero cold starts. $19 plan is going away, will launch a better $5 plan soon.
- matt-p 1y agoI use neon quite a bit, profiling seems to show ~600-980ms of extra latency. This is in the AWS London region, on postgres 15/16. Regardless if I've got a website that's used a couple of times a hour every hour then the practical reality is almost all users have a extra second of latency or so. I'm not complaining, it's a great product that I'll continue to use, but it's the biggest pain point.
- vladich 1y agoDatabricks previously invested in Neon through Databricks Ventures btw.