I honestly don't understand such negative response tone from the comments. Yes, it does promote Azure, but that's to be expected from a company with is part owned by Microsoft :).

The main point of the article is that it's actually not that hard to live with a single primary Postgres for your transactional workloads (emphasis on _transactional_), and if OpenAI with their 800M+ users can still survive on a single primary (with 50(!) read replicas), so could you, especially before you've reached your first 100M users.

Any non-distributed database or setup is orders of magnitude easier to design for, and it's also typically much more cost efficient too, both in terms of hardware and software too.

There are some curious details, e.g.:

- you can ship WAL to 50 read replicas simultaneously from a single primary and be fine - you can even be using an ORM and still get decent performance - schema changes are possible, and you can just cancel a slow ALTER to prevent production impact - pgbouncer is ok even for OpenAI scale

There are so many things that contradict current "conventional wisdom" based on the experience from what was possible with the hardware 10+ (or even 20+) years ago. Times finally changed and I really welcome articles like these that show how you can greatly simplify your production setup by leveraging the modern hardware.

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