Just Use Postgres for Durable Workflows

Re:Just Use Postgres for Durable Workflows by pants2 on Thursday May 28, 2026 @03:52PM (#48314464)

I thought Temporal was overly complex, but as you said the best part is it does enforce good engineering practices.

Then I tried their Cloud offering and was appalled at their pricing. I burned through the $1,000 free credits before I even got something to production. Didn't want to bother with running a local Temporal, either.

Best solution is to just take inspiration from their architecture and then do it yourself in Postgres, IMO.

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Re:Just Use Postgres for Durable Workflows by selcuka on Thursday May 28, 2026 @11:13PM (#48318563)

That's an interesting take. You didn't want to bother with running a local Temporal, but you are happy to engineer it yourself in Postgres?

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Re:Just Use Postgres for Durable Workflows by pants2 on Friday May 29, 2026 @12:00AM (#48318866)

We already have a Postgres instance running (as I'm sure most stacks have), so it's just another database table rather than a whole new piece of infrastructure that needs to be maintained, with its associated cost, attack surface, risk of Temporal going under or dropping support for OSS, authentication, and other unknowns.

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