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

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.

> the answer is "depends"?

Indeed that is the point I am trying to make in the article. Postgres oftentimes absolutely is the right tool to use, and oftentimes it's not. The thing I'm advocating to be wary of is "if all you have is a hammer...". This is to what "considered harmful" refers.