We're building the boring backend for apps and agents

Neon, the serverless Postgres database company, announced it is expanding its platform to include a full suite of backend primitives for AI agents, including authentication, object storage, compute, and an AI gateway. The company said it is applying its copy-on-write branching technology to these new services to provide isolated environments and guardrails against runaway autonomous agents. Neon, now part of Databricks, aims to offer a "boring," battle-tested infrastructure layer as an alternative to experimental cloud setups for agentic applications.

Everyone has been talking about throwing it all away and building entirely new magic sci-fi cloud infrastructure for agents. Amidst all the hype, this tweet https://x.com/rtheoryxyz/status/2056012016611905753 stood out to me as a voice of reason: Building real infrastructure is hard enough as it is. AI has only raised the stakes, dialing up the operational requirements and pushing the limits in new and unexpected ways. When autonomous agents or developers move at breakneck speeds, applications break. "Magic" won’t help you recover when a runaway agent deletes your production database and all its backups. Robust, familiar infrastructure with rollbacks, AI-friendly APIs and higher operational capacity is the way forward. The Hard Requirements of the AI Era When we founded Neon four years ago, the core principles laid out in our Hello World https://neon.com/blog/hello-world post were aimed at helping human developers move faster. As luck would have it, the AI era has shifted those exact principles into the "hard requirements" column: Low entry cost: When code generation is free and instant, even a $5 upfront infrastructure cost is a non-starter. Branching: Code has always had isolated environments, but the data stack lacked them. This created a massive gap in the ability to experiment safely. Serverless: Infrastructure should live automatically in the background, scaling instantly to meet shifting usage demands. A backend shouldn't be t-shirt sized; it should precisely match what the application demands of it. Human developers make mistakes cue the Matrix meme: "Only human" . But AI coding agents make mistakes at a blistering, automated velocity that traditional infrastructure simply wasn't designed to handle. Without strict guardrails, agents will tear down systems just as quickly as they build them. An Agentic Stack Built by Systems Engineers Neon's serverless Postgres branching changed how developers work by ensuring every single database change could be validated in an isolated environment. At this point, we start tens of millions of branches every day. Now, we’re taking the same copy-on-write, instant branching approach and applying it to the full suite of backend primitives today's agent stack requires. The Complete Agent-Native Backend Postgres Database — ✅ Available — ✅ Authentication Available — ✅ Data API Available Object Storage — 🔜 Coming Soon Compute — 🔜 Coming Soon AI Gateway — 🔜 Coming Soon Access We are launching a private beta soon. Sign up for updates and access here: Scaling with Enterprise Muscle One year after joining Databricks, the benefits are showing on both sides. Lakebase https://www.databricks.com/product/lakebase , the same technology as Neon on Databricks, is the fastest-growing new offering in Databricks history. In turn, being part of a larger company has helped us grow our database team with world-class engineers, improve platform performance https://neon.com/blog/turning-off-fpw-for-faster-writes , lower costs https://neon.com/blog/major-compute-price-reduction-on-neon , and now ship mature, battle-tested products to developers on Neon: The AI Gateway for example already handles more than 125 trillion tokens a month, hardened by rigorous enterprise requirements for day-0 model coverage, high availability, deep metrics, logging, and granular cost controls. To be clear: We are not shifting focus away from our core database product. Postgres remains the bedrock for everything we do. The Neon team has aggressively expanded within Databricks, and we've hired top-tier, senior engineering talent from other major database services. We are expanding our platform by building entirely new, dedicated teams while simultaneously growing our core Postgres engineering powerhouse. We're building the boring infrastructure layer. Go build sci-fi. FAQ Does this mean you're focusing less on database? No. The same storage and compute technology powers both Neon Serverless Postgres and Databricks Lakebase, so every improvement to the core engine benefits both products. Lakebase serves large enterprise customers; Neon serves startups, agent platforms and individual developers. Both are growing, and that growth funds a bigger systems engineering team, not a smaller one.Today, around 120 engineers work across storage, compute, proxy, and Postgres itself, including upstream contributions. The new primitives auth, object storage, compute, AI gateway are built by new, dedicated teams. We're adding to the platform, not redirecting from it. To accelerate progress of the core database platform, we’ve brought in senior engineering talent from other major database and cloud services over the past year. The Postgres team is the largest it's ever been. Are you building an entire cloud platform? No. We're focused on the primitives that apps and agents need to function: database, authentication, data API, object storage, compute, and an AI gateway. These are the pieces where branching, instant provisioning, and scale-to-zero matter most. For everything else, you'll still want the tools you already use. Front-end hosting Vercel, Netlify , email Resend , error tracking Sentry , and so on. We're not trying to replace them. Why AI Gateway? The lines are starting to blur between applications and agents, but regardless of what we call them, the lifeblood of what everyone is building today is inference - we're bringing reliable/scalable inference directly to you when you build your backend in Neon. We're not building this from scratch. Databricks already operates an AI gateway that handles trillions of requests a day for everyone from fortune 500 enterprises to popular coding agents, with day-0 coverage of new models, rate limiting, logging, metrics, and cost controls. When will the new primitives be available? Authentication and the Data API are available today. Object Storage, Compute, and the AI Gateway are coming soon. If you want early access, sign up above and we'll reach out when each one is ready. Will existing Neon projects need to change? No. Your existing databases, branches, and connections keep working exactly as they do now. The new primitives are additive. Adopt the ones you need, ignore the ones you don't.