[magden]

Scalability is not the only reason for jumping on a distributed Postgres version.

Some apps might do just 1000 ops/second but still run on a distributed database for high availability or data locality reasons. For instance, shared-nothing databases usually guarantee RPO=0 (no data loss, recovery point objective) with RTO (recovery time objective) measured in seconds for zone and region-level outages. As for data locality, think automatic data placement/pinning to regions/data centers for data regulatory and low latency reasons (serve read/write requests equally fast for folks living in NYC, London, Tokyo).

[never_inline]

Any reason you can't achieve those RPO/RTO with straightforward replication?

[magden]

You can achieve RPO=0 with Postgres using synchronous logical replication. You would need to replicate to 2+ standbys because if there is only one standby and it goes down then the primary will stuck. During the failover you would need to have Patroni or comparable tool, but I don’t know what’s the RTO.

But once you outgrow the primary/standbys severs storage or compute capacity you would need to scale to larger machines that can incur downtimes. With distributed Postgres such as YugabyteDB this is not gonna happen because you can scale horizontally