[HN Gopher] "You Don't Need Kafka, Just Use Postgres" Considered...
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       "You Don't Need Kafka, Just Use Postgres" Considered Harmful
        
       Author : ingve
       Score  : 22 points
       Date   : 2025-11-02 20:37 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.morling.dev)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.morling.dev)
        
       | ekjhgkejhgk wrote:
       | "Considered harmful" considered harmful.
        
       | philipwhiuk wrote:
       | > Named a Java Champion, I enjoy speaking at conferences, for
       | instance at QCon, JavaOne, Red Hat Summit, JavaZone, JavaLand and
       | Kafka Summit.
        
         | candiddevmike wrote:
         | That tracks, I feel like Kafka is over represented in the Java
         | codebases I've seen TBH.
        
       | cultofmetatron wrote:
       | Id argue that if you are in the position where you legitimately
       | NEED kafka, you hopefully also know what you're doing. You're
       | outside the audience for the "just use postres" crowd. That said,
       | if you're in a startup with a few thousand users, just use
       | postgres is still solid advice.
        
         | threatofrain wrote:
         | If you need some kind of event streaming system there are other
         | choices which have less dev ops burden, such as just using any
         | particular cloud's proprietary or managed offerings. I've seen
         | two companies on NATS so far, I'm trying it out myself for size
         | as well.
         | 
         | There are plenty of choices between PSQL & Kafka. It's not like
         | you take one step north and you're in the "oh no you better
         | know what you're doing" territory.
        
       | hactually wrote:
       | isn't Kafka old news at this point?
       | 
       | LinkedIn have moved onto Northguard... but no GitHub yet
        
       | blindriver wrote:
       | ""You don't need Kafka" considered harmful by employees of
       | Kafka."
        
         | redhale wrote:
         | Yes. Setting aside the specific merits of the argument, this
         | blog post should really have a disclaimer somewhere that the
         | author works for Confluent, a major managed Kafka service
         | provider. Perhaps that makes him an expert on this topic, but
         | it should still be disclosed!
         | 
         | > Managed services make running Kafka a very uneventful
         | experience (pun intended) and should be the first choice
         | 
         | Confluent, you say?
        
           | gunnarmorling wrote:
           | > this blog post should really have a disclaimer somewhere
           | that the author works for Confluent
           | 
           | Good idea; this is stated in the bio on my web site, but I've
           | just added the same info again to the end of the post.
        
         | pheggs wrote:
         | employee of Confluent.
         | 
         | I think that shouldn't matter but I still have a lot to
         | disagree with the article.
         | 
         | feels like overengineering has become the standard for some
         | people, and I quite dislike it personally.
        
       | atoav wrote:
       | Could we _please_ just agree not to use this  "considered
       | harmful" phrase to describe advice where the answer is "depends"?
       | This kinda makes the author seem like he has lost the ability to
       | consider what software is out there. That he is working for Kafka
       | doesn't help.
       | 
       | Example: Someone writes a software that could use something
       | simple like SQLite, and they switched to Postgres for performance
       | reasons. Now unless what Kafka beings is the core reason they
       | switched to Postgres not pulling in another dependency and adding
       | a nother piece to the puzzle, _can_ be a total legitimate
       | engineering decision. And that renders the  "considered harmful"
       | utterly ridiculous.
       | 
       | Use a system like Kafka if you need what it brings (a distributed
       | event streaming platform). If that isn't what you need or a very
       | simple postgres solition suffices, go for that. Maybe you need
       | event streaming but distributing it is overkill. Maybe you just
       | need some sort of queue. Who knows? Not the author of this post.
        
       | scottcodie wrote:
       | One thing the other blog post missed and this post misses too is
       | that you don't need Kafka to use Debezium with Postgres. This
       | gives you a pretty seamless onramp to event streaming tools as
       | you scale.
        
       | brettgriffin wrote:
       | > Looking to make it to the front page of HackerNews?
       | 
       | Nailed it. I read the original post earlier this week and was
       | very impressed with its technical detail. But the point of the
       | the post was incongruent with the post's title. But the post got
       | way more attention because of that title.
       | 
       | But if you think about the effort it took to write that post, the
       | title was a really good bet on ROI.
        
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       (page generated 2025-11-02 23:01 UTC)