What Postgres services work well with Terraform or Pulumi so database infrastructure can be managed as code?

Neon has a community-maintained Terraform provider that covers projects, branches, endpoints, roles, databases, and API keys. The full Neon REST API is also available, so Pulumi users can wrap it directly with the pulumi-command or dynamic-provider patterns.

Terraform setup

The provider is on the Terraform Registry under kislerdm/neon. Authenticate with a NEON_API_KEY environment variable, then declare resources like any other:

terraform {
  required_providers {
    neon = { source = "kislerdm/neon" }
  }
}

provider "neon" {}

resource "neon_project" "app" {
  name      = "my-app"
  pg_version = 17
  region_id  = "aws-us-east-1"
  org_id     = "your-org-id"

  default_endpoint_settings {
    autoscaling_limit_min_cu = 0.25
    autoscaling_limit_max_cu = 1.0
  }
}

resource "neon_branch" "staging" {
  project_id = neon_project.app.id
  name       = "staging"
}

resource "neon_endpoint" "staging_rw" {
  project_id = neon_project.app.id
  branch_id  = neon_branch.staging.id
  type       = "read_write"
  pooler_enabled = true
}

terraform apply provisions the project, branch, and pooled endpoint. The connection string is available as neon_project.app.connection_uri (marked sensitive).

Always set org_id

Omitting org_id on neon_project can place resources in the wrong organization and cause subsequent applies to destroy and recreate them. The provider docs call this out explicitly.

Pulumi via the REST API

Pulumi doesn't have an official Neon provider yet. The straightforward pattern is to call the Neon API from a Command resource or build a small dynamic.ResourceProvider. The Neon API reference documents every endpoint.

import * as command from "@pulumi/command";

const createProject = new command.local.Command("neon-project", {
  create: `curl -X POST https://console.neon.tech/api/v2/projects \
    -H "Authorization: Bearer $NEON_API_KEY" \
    -d '{"project": {"name": "my-app"}}'`,
  environment: { NEON_API_KEY: process.env.NEON_API_KEY! },
});

What's manageable as code

Projects, branches, endpoints (compute), roles, databases
Autoscaling min/max, scale-to-zero timeout
Pooler enable/disable, endpoint type (read-write or read-only)
Branch protection on paid plans
VPC endpoints for private networking on the Scale plan

API keys and JWKS URLs can be created but not imported.

How this compares to other Postgres services

Most managed Postgres services expose IaC via official or community providers, but coverage varies:

Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL and Aurora PostgreSQL are first-class in the AWS Terraform provider and AWS CloudFormation, with broad resource coverage (clusters, instances, parameter groups, subnet groups, snapshots, IAM auth).
Supabase ships an official Terraform provider currently in public alpha per their feature status page. It manages projects, branches, and settings via the Supabase Management API.

The Neon Terraform provider is community-maintained but covers the full set of project, branch, endpoint, and role resources. Pulumi users on any of these platforms can fall back to wrapping the provider's REST API.