| ▲ | s8kur 3 hours ago | |
Consensus is one of those areas where the interesting engineering and the number of people who actually need it are inversely correlated. Most "we need distributed coordination" turns out to be "we need one writer and a lock," which a single Postgres hands you for free: advisory locks, SELECT ... FOR UPDATE, SKIP LOCKED for work distribution. Linearizability without running Raft.. The real threshold is multi-region writes on a hard latency budget, and even then a single-region primary plus accepting cross-region read latency beats eating a consensus round-trip on every write for a lot of teams. Curious what workload pushed you past single-primary - usually a better story than the impl itself. | ||
| ▲ | throwaway894345 33 minutes ago | parent [-] | |
> Most "we need distributed coordination" turns out to be "we need one writer and a lock," which a single Postgres hands you for free 1. This article is about Cloudflare developing for their own internal control plane--I'm fairly certain their requirements preclude a single Postgres 2. Even if you're not Cloudflare, you may not want to be limited by the availability of a single Postgres instance. | ||