Stop Standing Up an S3 Bucket Per Preview Environment

If your app stores files and you want real preview environments, you eventually hit the same wall: each preview needs its own storage, so you start provisioning a bucket per environment. That sounds cheap until you write it down. For every ephemeral environment you create a bucket, attach a policy, mint an IAM role or access keys, set CORS, add a lifecycle rule so it eventually cleans up, wire the credentials into the preview's config, and register a teardown step for when the PR closes. Then you find the orphaned buckets the teardown missed, months later, still billing. The reason this is painful is that the bucket is a separate resource from the database, so it needs its own lifecycle. Neon collapses that: the bucket is declared as part of the branch, so it is created and destroyed with the branch and needs no per-environment provisioning at all. This post compares the two approaches and shows the branch version working with no bucket-management code in sight. The repo is at the end. TL;DR Isolated storage per preview usually means provisioning a bucket per environment: policy, IAM, CORS, lifecycle, credential wiring, teardown. It is slow, it drifts, and it leaves orphaned buckets that keep costing money. On Neon the bucket is declared once in neon.ts . Creating a branch brings the bucket (with a copy-on-write copy of the files) and injects scoped credentials; deleting the branch removes it. There is no per-environment bucket to create, no IAM role to mint, and nothing to orphan. Copy-on-write means fifty preview buckets do not cost fifty times the storage, only what each one changes. Prerequisites A Neon project on the platform preview (object storage, us-east-2 ) The Neon CLI, and a CI system that opens/closes preview environments Familiarity with S3 buckets and IAM if you have done the manual version The per-environment bucket, written out Here is what "just give the preview its own bucket" actually expands to, per environment: Create a bucket with a unique nam