[outworlder]

Are they _forcing_ you to use CloudFormation? Or is it just the officially supported mechanism?

> Mother Postgres can do no wrong.

I'll say that Postgres is usually the answer for the vast majority of use-cases. Even when you think you need something else to do something different, it's probably still a good enough solution. I've seen teams pitching other system just because they wanted to push a bunch of JSON. Guess what, PG can handle that fine and even run SQL queries against that. PG can access other database systems with its foreign data wrappers(https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Foreign_data_wrappers).

The main difficulty is that horizontally scaling it is not trivial(although not impossible, and that can be improved with third party companies).

[JohnBooty]

Yes. Postgres such a reliable and known quantity that IMO it should be the default choice for just about anything.

Don't misunderstand me. There are plenty of times when something else is the right choice. I'm just saying, when I have a say in the matter, folks need to clear that bar -- "tell me why tool xyz is going to be so much better than postgres for this use case that it justifies the overhead of adding another piece of software infrastructure."

Like, you want to add a document database? Obviously Mongo, Elasticsearch, etc are "best of breed." But Postgres is pretty capable and this team is already good at it. Are we ever going to have so many documents that e.g. Elasticsearch's mostly-effortless horizontal scaling even comes into play? If you don't ever see yourself scaling past 1,000 documents then adding a new piece of infra is a total joke. I see that kind of thing all the time. I can't tell if developers truly do not understand scale, or if they simply do not give a f--- and simply want to play with shiny new toys and enrich their resumes.

I mean, I've literally had devops guys telling me we need a Redis cluster even though we were only storing a few kilobytes of data, that was read dozens of times daily with zero plans to scale. That could have been a f'in Postgres table. Devops guy defended that choice hard even when pressed by mgmt to reduce AWS spend. WTF?

[jwr]

> Postgres such a reliable and known quantity that IMO it should be the default choice for just about anything.

This is being repeated so often. And yet — the above is true, IF (and that's a big if for some of us) you are OK with having your database on a single machine.

If you want a distributed database with strict serializability, where some nodes can go down and you still get correct answers, Postgres is not it.

[JohnBooty]

Totally agree. That's really my thinking as well. Default to Postgres unless you have a reason not to choose it, and a need for distributed serializability is one of those cases where Postgres is an easy "nope, not suitable."

But I've also been burned by people reflexively reaching for $SHINY_NEW_TOY by default, when really there is no need. Architects and senior-level devs are the worst offenders. They throw a bunch of needlessly buzzword-compliant infra at a problem and then move on. They have the time and freedom to learn $SHINY_NEW_TOY well enough to MVP a product, but then the project is passed on to people who don't have that luxury.

I feel like there's a progression that often happens:

1. Early engineers: stick to Postgres or another RDBMS because it's all they know

2. Mid-stage engineers with "senior" in their title for the first time: reach for $SHINY_NEW_TOY

3. Late-stage engineers: stick to Postgres because it's something the whole team already knows and they recognize the true long-term cost of throwing multiple new bits of software infra into the mix

[quickthrower2]

Where does sqlite fit into the heuristic? I thought for toy apps or small sites it might be an even easier option and cheaper.