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Comment by dewey | Hacker News Reader

The point is in general for people to just consider it, often people start out on their side projects or internal company projects and commission Elastic, Redis, Postgres, Kafka before even getting started. In reality they could fit it all into Postgres for a very long time.

Nobody is saying that a huge ecommerce store with complicated filtered search logic should throw away their Elasticsearch cluster and switch to Postgres.

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If you actually start looking into these things, you often start looking at custom pg extensions, which means you just made the decision to "simplify" your stack by maintaining your own postgres cluster with custom extensions. This is just papering over the fact that you're increasing the complexity and saying "well it's still just postgres!" as you do it.

Installing & maintaining a Postgres extension is vastly, vastly simpler than running Elasticsearch and Kafka. Like, how could you even compare these things if you know what you are talking about?

Or maybe you are looking at it from "just swipe your credit card at AWS" perspective, in which case "just use Postgres" articles are for a different audience.

Running a small ES with dual save alongside your relational store is trivial. Kafka I will grant you is a lot to operate, but I would not choose Kafka unless I have a Kafka-shaped problem, and if it looks like that I would never, ever choose Postgres. Equating Kafka with “I need a queue” is a laughable comparison.

Not really, most popular extensions are available on GCP/AWS (https://docs.cloud.google.com/sql/docs/postgres/extensions) out of the box and there's many things that you can easily run in Postgres without extensions (Queue, KV store).

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