Setting up Neon serverless Postgres as an Azure Native Integration

Neon's serverless Postgres is now available as a native integration within the Azure ecosystem, allowing organizations to provision Neon organizations directly from the Azure portal. This integration combines the power of Neon's serverless architecture with Azure's robust cloud infrastructure, offering features like Single Sign-On (SSO), unified billing, and resource management. This guide walks you through the process of setting up and managing Neon Serverless Postgres via the Azure Marketplace.

Prerequisites

• An Azure account with an active subscription

Key benefits of Neon on Azure

The Azure Native integration delivers significant advantages that enhance both developer productivity and business operations:

• Azure Portal Integration: Create and manage Neon organizations directly through the Azure portal, eliminating the need to switch between platforms
• Enhanced Development Experience: Leverage familiar tools, including the Azure CLI and popular SDKs (Node.js, Python, .NET, Java, Go) for consistent workflow management
• Single Sign-On: Access Neon using your Microsoft credentials, improving security and simplifying authentication
• Unified Billing: Track and manage Neon expenses alongside other Azure services in one consolidated bill
• Cost Optimization: Optimize your cloud spend by applying Neon usage toward your Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment.

The Neon integration is available through the Azure Marketplace.

Creating your Neon organization

To get started with Neon on Azure, you'll need to create a Neon organization within your Azure environment. This process is streamlined through the Azure portal, allowing you to manage your Neon resources alongside other Azure services.

Access Neon through Azure Marketplace

1. Navigate to the Azure Portal.
2. Search for Neon Serverless Postgres in the search bar.
3. Select the offering from the Marketplace results.

Choosing the right plan

You will be prompted to select a plan based on your organization's requirements: While starting with the Free Plan is an excellent way to explore Neon's capabilities, understanding the full range of plans helps you make informed decisions as your needs evolve.

Free plan: Perfect for getting started

The Free Plan provides an excellent entry point for developers and small projects. With 10 projects, 0.5 GB-month storage, and 190 compute hours, you can build and test applications while experiencing Neon's core features like database branching, read replicas and Postgres extensions

Scale plan: Growing with your application

As your application grows, the Scale Plan offers substantial increases in resources and features for growing organizations, including:

• 50 GB-month storage + 250 GB-month archive storage
• 750 compute hours
• 1,000 projects
• Autoscaling up to 8 vCPUs
• Point-in-time restore (PITR) up to 14 days
• IP Allow Rules for enhanced security
• Datadog integration for advanced monitoring

Business plan: Enterprise-ready features

For organizations requiring enterprise-grade features, the Business Plan provides everything on the Scale plan plus more resources and features:

• 500 GB storage + 2500 GB-month archive storage
• 1000 compute hours
• 5,000 projects
• Autoscaling up to 16 vCPUs
• Larger fixed compute sizes up to 56 vCPU
• Point-in-time restore (PITR) up to 30 days
• Enhanced compliance with SOC 2 and ISO certifications
• Guaranteed 99.95% SLA for mission-critical applications
• Priority support for quick issue resolution
• Private Link support for secure connectivity

Configuring your resource

For this guide, we'll use the Free Tier, but you can easily upgrade later as your needs grow. We will proceed to the resource configuration stage by clicking on Subscribe with the Free Plan selected.

After selecting your plan, you'll need to configure your Neon resource within Azure. Begin by selecting your Azure subscription and creating or choosing an existing resource group. The resource group helps you organize and manage related Azure resources together. Next, provide a meaningful resource name that helps you identify this Neon deployment within your Azure environment.

You can create a Neon resource in the East US 2, Germany West Central, and West US 3 regions, but keep in mind that this is the region for the Azure resource, not your Neon database — you'll select a region for your actual database in a later step. Finally, create a distinctive organization name that reflects your company or project. This organization name will be visible in both Azure and the Neon Console.

Click Review + Create to proceed to the final stage of the deployment process. The Azure portal will validate your configuration settings, ensuring that all required fields are correctly filled. Once the validation is successful, click Create to deploy your Neon resource. Azure will begin provisioning your resource, which typically takes a few minutes. You should see a notification indicating that your Neon resource has been successfully deployed.

Managing your Neon resource

Accessing the Neon Console

After successful deployment, accessing your Neon Console is straightforward through Azure's SSO integration. Navigate to your newly created Neon resource in the Azure portal, where you'll find the SSO link under Portal URL.

This link provides access to the Neon Console using your Azure credentials, eliminating the need for separate authentication processes.

Creating your first project

Upon accessing the Neon Console, you'll be directed to the project creation view. Here, you can create your first Neon project.

Neon organizes your databases into projects, each serving as an independent unit for database management and development. You can customize your project with the following details:

• Project name: Typically named for your application or user.
• Database name: Specify whatever database name makes sense. The default name is neondb. The name will form part of your database connection string.
• Region: When selecting a region, consider the geographical location of your applications and users. Choose the region that provides the lowest latency for your primary user base.
• Advanced options: Neon uses branches for data, similar to git branches. The default branch is named main. If you want, you can specify a different name.
• Autoscaling range: Set your project's autoscaling range. Compute resources will scale up and down within the specified range to meet demand.

Exploring your project and database

Once your project is created, a default branch and Postgres database are automatically generated within it. You will be redirected to the project dashboard, which displays details of your project. This dashboard is your central hub for monitoring resources, setting up connections, and managing your database.

Here are some key features you'll find:

• Connection string: The connection string provides the necessary details to connect your applications to the database.
• Branching: You can create new database branches from the default one. Learn more about database branching here.
• Monitoring: The dashboard allows you to monitor resource usage, including compute, storage, and connections count.

Connecting your application

To connect your application to the Neon database, copy the connection URL from the project dashboard and use it in your application stack. This URL contains the necessary credentials and connection details to establish a connection to your Neon database.

For more about connecting your application to Neon, see Connect to Neon. Neon also provides the following resources to help get you up and running:

• Neon framework guides
• Neon language guides
• Connection examples repo
• Application templates repo

Platform-Specific Management: Azure Portal vs. Neon Console

Azure Portal: Your Administrative hub

The Azure portal provides a unified management experience for your Neon resources, serving as the primary entry point within the Azure ecosystem. It allows you to create and manage Neon organizations, which can then be accessed through the dedicated Neon Console. The Azure portal also centralizes your Neon financial management, providing cost views, allowing application of your Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment, and enabling unified billing reports.

Additionally, accessing Neon via the Azure portal enables SSO, which simplifies access to the Neon Console, and lets you manage Neon organization access via Azure RBAC.

In essence, the Azure portal provides a centralized platform for managing the administrative and financial aspects of your Neon integration within Azure. On the other hand, the management of databases, individual projects, and their advanced features is managed in the Neon Console, which we'll discuss next.

Neon Console: Your Database management and development hub

The Neon Console is your dedicated environment for the day-to-day management of your Postgres databases and development workflows, providing a specialized set of tools beyond what's available in the Azure portal. This is where you create and manage individual database projects, configure autoscaling to adapt to your workload, and access database monitoring metrics to ensure optimal performance.

In the Neon Console, you can create read replicas to scale your read operations without impacting your primary database. You can also leverage Neon's branching capabilities, enabling you to quickly create instant copies of your database for isolated development and testing purposes. This can be instrumental when implementing database changes or developing new features.

If needed, the Neon Console facilitates instant database restoration via it's point in time restore feature. Additionally, the console provides performance and usage monitoring, allowing you to track your usage, monitor database connections, and more. The Neon Console also allows for various integrations with popular developer tools and services, enhancing the overall workflow, which is essential to ensure that your database functions are streamlined and integrated into your development ecosystem.

In short, the Neon Console provides the essential capabilities needed for database administration, development, and optimization of your Postgres databases, giving you granular control over your data and your development workflow.

Support

Neon offers a range of support options to help you get the most out of your Neon on Azure deployment. The following table outlines the support channels available at each plan level:

Additional Resources

• Neon Documentation
• Microsoft Azure Documentation
• Azure Marketplace
• Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment Benefit