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All Things P99

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Reworking the Neon IO stack: Rust+tokio+io_uring+O_DIRECT

Neon is a serverless Postgres platform. Recently acquired by Databricks, the same technology now also powers Databricks Lakebase. In this talk, we will dive into Pageserver, the multi-tenant storage service at the heart of the architecture. We share techniques and lessons learned from reworking its IO stack to a fully asynchronous model, with direct IO against local NVMe drives; all during a period of rapid growth.

Pageserver is implemented in Rust, we use the tokio async runtime for networking, and integrate it with io_uring for filesystem access.

21 minutes
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Christian Schwarz, Member of Technical Staff at Databricks

Christian is a software engineer passionate about foundational systems software. He started working on Pageserver in November 2022 with many side quests into other areas of the Neon stack. Prior work includes contributions to OpenZFS and its ecosystem, both as a student and as an employee at Nutanix.