PostgreSQL as a Microservice

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2021-06-08 14:30:10

The MACI French podcast honoured me with an invitation to a guest appearance on their weekly schedule. As you can imagine, we talked about many things related to PostgreSQL… and also reacted to some newsworthy articles carefully curated by the MACI team. One of the topics we discussed in the podcast started with looking at PostgreSQL through the angle of it being one of the microservices that your application would be composed of.

I must admit looking at Postgres as a microservice is an exerise that I like. It allows focusing on what Postgres offers that your application is happy to re-use rather than having to implement it for itself.

At a first glance, the Postgres microservice might look like a storage API to many developers, and that’s how we got started in the podcast.

I believe that’s a mistake though. A storage service would typically host files encoded as XML, JSON, Parquet, or some other format, and rely on a get/set API such as the ones found in all the Cloud services nowadays (think AWS S3, Azure Storage, or GCP Cloud Storage… or if you want to host it yourself, have a look at MinIO).