Database, Managed (Neon)

Neon is a managed PostgreSQL service with a generous free tier, branching, and automatic scaling. Olympus's Daedalus wizard supports Neon natively.

For most operators, managed Postgres is the right choice, self-hosting Postgres alongside Olympus on the same VPS is doable but adds a stateful service that you have to back up, monitor, and rotate certs for.

What Daedalus does

In the Database, Neon wizard step:

1. Reads your Neon API key.
2. Creates a Neon project (or uses an existing one you select).
3. Provisions five databases inside the project: ciam_kratos, ciam_hydra, iam_kratos, iam_hydra, olympus.
4. Generates a strong password for each.
5. Records the per-database DATABASE_URL (with sslmode=verify-full and the Neon CA bundle) in the deployment context.

Why Neon

• Branching, each commit can have its own ephemeral Postgres branch for migration testing. Olympus doesn't use this in CI yet but the option exists.
• Compute-only billing, pay for CPU minutes, not provisioned capacity. Olympus's auth traffic is bursty; this saves money.
• Free tier, sufficient for ~1k MAU.
• TLS by default with verify-full support.
• EU-resident options for GDPR compliance.

Connection details

Each of the five databases gets its own connection string:

postgres://ciam_kratos_user:<pass>@<endpoint>.neon.tech/ciam_kratos?sslmode=verify-full&sslrootcert=neon-ca.crt

The Neon CA bundle is fetched once during deployment and stored at /etc/ssl/certs/neon-ca.crt inside each app container. See Deploy, Database SSL verify-full for the full rationale.

Connection pooling

Olympus uses a postgres-js-based pool in the SDK (default max: 10 per app instance). With four Ory services and three app services per domain, the pool count per Neon endpoint is ~40 connections. Neon's free tier allows 100 connections; the next tier is 1000.

If you see "too many connections" errors, lower the SDK pool size via SDK_POOL_MAX=5 env var on each app.

Backups

Neon automatically retains every commit for 7 days (free tier) or 30 days (paid). Point-in-time recovery is one click.

For belt-and-suspenders backups, run nightly pg_dump against each of the five databases, see Operate, Backups (Postgres).

Pricing estimate

For a 1k-MAU Olympus deployment:

• Compute: ~10 hours active CPU/month (auth traffic is light) = ~$3
• Storage: ~500MB across all five DBs = $0.15
• Total: ~$3-5/month on the paid tier.

The free tier covers smaller deployments entirely.

When Neon isn't the right answer

• No internet egress from your VPS (e.g. air-gapped deployments), use self-hosted Postgres.
• You need >1000 concurrent connections, Neon's connection limits become a bottleneck at significant scale.
• You're already operating a Postgres cluster, use that instead.

Where next

• Deploy, Database SSL verify-full, the production TLS contract.
• Operate, Backups (Postgres)
• Deploy, First production deploy