How to: Multi tenancy beyond 500 tenants with Neon?
Hi there,
I'm a little confused. All marketing material/ YouTube/ blog posts tout multi tenancy as a DB per tenant for Neon.
However, the pricing pages simply list a limit of 500 DBs (per branch) for all plans.
That was quite a surprise to me.
How is one supposed to scale beyond this 500?
Simultaneously keep n "main" branches in sync?
Duplicate projects?
Seeing how projects scale across plans, is one supposed to duplicate projects?
Eventually settle for a less isolated multi-tenancy model?
I'm quite confused as to the intended use from an end user perspective of tenants with the intention to be able to scale beyond 500 of them.
What am I missing?
4 Replies
conscious-sapphire•13mo ago
hey @bluenoise - sorry to cause confusion. This is a simple terminology mixup. Customers that run multi-tenancy use a Neon Project per tenant. Databases are the PostgreSQL concept of a container for SQL objects like schemas, tables, views....
Here is a good explainer https://neon.tech/docs/manage/overview
Neon
Overview of the Neon object hierarchy - Neon Docs
Managing your Neon project requires an understanding of the Neon object hierarchy. The following diagram shows how objects in Neon are related. See below for a description of each object. Neon account...
conscious-sapphire•13mo ago
Many Neon customers have tens even hundreds of thousands of projects deployed in a "project-per-customer" architecture.
I will see if we can clear up the wording on pricing and marketing site
passive-yellowOP•13mo ago
Hi @andyhats thanks for the reply! I'd certainly encourage a more tenant/ customer aligned wording - and highlight the fact that DBs are unlimited.
First thing people look at quickly is Pricing pages, right? Comparing with Supabase or Nile.dev, I find metrics that I find easy to reason about from a dev perspective (number of users/ maus/ DBs).
Even when checking the docs, I'm amazed it says nowhere that generally Project = tenant. Even when I google "Neon Postgres", the first sentence of the SERP is "Use the Neon API to deploy database-per-tenant architectures."
Then to nowhere read about tenants in either the Neon object page OR the pricing page feels like a major mismatch to me.
quickest-silver•11mo ago
Hey @bluenoise! I'm working on a page that describes how you can implement a database per tenant architecture on Neon. This is a preview, would love to know your feedback and if there's something that can be improved
https://neon-next-4w52m3qe8-neondatabase.vercel.app/use-cases/database-per-tenant
Neon
Database per tenant at scale
Manage thousands of Postgres databases with minimal effort and costs.