Gunnar Morling

A rebuttal to the popular 'You Don't Need Kafka, Just Use Postgres' genre of posts. The author argues these posts conflate job queues with event streaming, and miss the many Kafka capabilities that go beyond scalability: persistent log semantics, consumer groups, millisecond latency, a rich connector ecosystem, and battle-tested client tooling. Replacing Kafka with Postgres for event streaming use cases means eventually rebuilding most of Kafka yourself. The recommended approach is to use both tools for their respective strengths—Postgres for relational state management, Kafka for event streaming—and keep them in sync via CDC and the outbox pattern using tools like Debezium.

"You Don't Need Kafka, Just Use Postgres" Considered Harmful