Enable Autoscaling in Neon

Neon's Autoscaling feature dynamically adjusts the amount of compute resources allocated to a Neon compute endpoint in response to the current workload, eliminating the need for manual intervention. This guide demonstrates how to enable Autoscaling in your Neon project.

Autoscaling is a Neon Pro plan feature. Pro plan users can enable Autoscaling for any compute endpoint in a Neon project. Autoscaling is supported with both read-write and read-only compute endpoints. Read-only compute endpoints enable Neon's Read replica feature.

You can enable Autoscaling in an existing project by editing a compute endpoint. You can also enable it when you first create a Neon project, which sets the Autoscaling defaults for your project. Both methods are described below.

Enable Autoscaling for a compute endpoint

Neon Pro plan users can edit an individual compute endpoint to alter the compute endpoint configuration, which includes Autoscaling.

To edit a compute endpoint:

1. In the Neon Console, select Branches.

2. Select a branch.

3. Click the compute endpoint kebab menu, and select Edit.

4. Under Compute size, select the Autoscaling option.

5. Using the slider, specify a minimum and maximum compute size.

   Neon scales the compute size up and down within the specified range to meet workload demand. Autoscaling currently supports a range of 1/4 (.25) to 7 vCPUs. One vCPU has 4 GB of RAM, 2 vCPUs have 8 GB of RAM, and so on. The amount of RAM in GBs is always 4 times the number of vCPUs.

   note

   You can configure the Auto-suspend delay setting for your compute endpoint at the same time. The Auto-suspend delay setting defines the number of seconds of inactivity after which a compute endpoint is automatically suspended. This feature is also referred to as "scale-to-zero".

6. Click Save.

Set Autoscaling defaults when creating a project

A project is a top-level object in the Neon object hierarchy. You can think of it as a container for all other objects, including branches and compute endpoints.

Enabling Autoscaling when you create a project allows you to set Autoscaling default settings for all compute endpoints created in your project. You can adjust Autoscaling settings for individual compute endpoints afterward, but setting defaults when creating a project saves you from having to configure the settings for each compute later on.

To configure Autoscaling default settings at project creation time:

1. Navigate to the Neon Console.

2. If you are creating your very first project, click Create a project. Otherwise, click New Project.

3. Specify a name, a Postgres version, and a region.

4. Under Compute size, select the Autoscaling option.

5. Using the slider, specify a minimum and maximum compute size.

   note

   You can also specify a default Auto-suspend delay setting at project creation time. The Auto-suspend delay setting defines the number of seconds of inactivity after which a compute endpoint is automatically suspended. This feature is also referred to as "scale-to-zero". The setting specified at project creation time becomes the default setting for newly created compute endpoints.

6. Click Create Project. Your initial compute endpoint is created with the specified settings. All compute endpoints created in the future when creating a branch or adding a compute endpoint to a branch are created with this setting.

Monitor Autoscaling

The neon_utils extension provides a num_cpus() function for monitoring how the Autoscaling feature allocates compute resources in response to workload. For more information, see The neon_utils extension.