We have a durable queue built into postgres to handle some complex notification-ish logic. It's worked excellently and while there are services various cloud providers would love to sell us to do that it's extremely cheap to run.

For that particular usage, the volume we process and business criticality make it a good choice for inventing here - but for other durable processes we just use off the shelf tools since the cost of maintenance would quickly outstrip the value.

Postgres is a great tool to use and far more powerful than most people give it credit for - but there's always the balance of in-house maintenance vs. paying rent for someone else's solution.

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PunchyHamster 3 hours ago | parent [-]

what's "maintenance" here ? If app is also using PostgreSQL it should be just initial effort of writing/importing code to run it, no ?

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munk-a 3 hours ago | parent [-]

You pay for everything you build - the more complexity you put into it the more that costs over time. Dependencies need to be updated, language/framework upgrades usually break something, new features/requirements introduce additional complexity and code to manage. Software just costs money every day - not a lot, our industry is much lower margin than, say, stamping sheets of metal into tools - but it still has operational costs beyond just the money to operate the hardware we run our products on.

	▲	PunchyHamster 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I know that. This looks like some lib you update once a year/every new CVE, and it is compared to a lib from cloud vendor and also update once a year/every new CVE, which is why I asked what it costed YOU in this particular case.