Postgres supports literally just about any use case with highly successful results, and when implemented correctly goes from “free and good enough” to “reliable, scalable, and meets all my requirements”. 

Using Postgres means you get total control over your data and how it’s managed; it’s the ultimate lens for understanding your infrastructure, reducing costs, and optimizing your workload for performance, high availability, and resiliency.

With decades of development backing the project and a global community contributing from every industry and background, Postgres has become a solid choice as a data management solution for mission critical applications across any kind of workload, including geospatial, vector, time-series, IoT, OLTP, and OLAP.

Postgres adoption is growing rapidly, and businesses that end up using it often have an “a-ha!” moment that leads them to understand that Postgres really does work for a diverse array of use cases.

However, as enterprise demand for scalability and flexibility grows, it’s still common to see concerns arise, like:

Can Postgres Handle Our Uptime Requirements?

A survey published July 10, 2025 from Foundry focused on the evaluation of "PostgreSQL Usage in Mission-Critical Operations: From High Availability to Cloud Outages". 212 IT professionals working at companies (with 500+ employees) using Postgres were surveyed on their use of Postgres in development and production deployments.

The conclusion:  Postgres can be adapted to handle workloads that are in the terabytes in real-time, with fault tolerance, consistency, and availability. So much so, that in the survey it was found that the vast majority (62%) of organizations using Postgres have a hard requirement that there can be no more than four minutes of downtime a month (99.99%). 24% actually required that there be less than 30 seconds a month of downtime (99.999%).

These results show Postgres is trusted by companies with extremely high availability standards to handle their data, across industries like FBSI, Software & Computing, and Manufacturing.

Beyond the survey, you'll find Postgres powering well-known emerging platforms like Mastodon, established services like Groupon and Trivago, financial services companies like Revolut, and countless government institutions and international banks.  Even the internet-based grocery delivery service Instacart recently announced they chose to switch from Elasticsearch to PostgreSQL and saw “nearly 80% savings on storage and indexing costs, reduced dead-end searches, and [overall improved] customer experience.”

The common thread? These organizations chose Postgres not because it was free, but because it delivered the reliability, performance, and scalability their business demanded.

Choosing a Postgres HA Solution

Postgres is 100% free-and-open-source (under its own licensing). As a result, the Postgres ecosystem is vast - you should leverage it to make the most of the power of Postgres. Many distributed Postgres extensions are out there, but only a few are in complete alignment with the open-source core of Postgres, ensuring you’re not subject to unexpected limitations. (A great resource for comparing some of the options is PGScorecard.)

The Foundry survey shows organizations are employing many different solutions for database failover and redundancy management. Of the solutions available:

  • 41% are Built-in cloud provider solutions.

  • 33% are commercial high availability products.

  • 29% are open-source (including Patroni, CloudNativePG, repmgr, and pg_autofailover) or are custom-built.

But as with anything, it’s important to compare solutions and know the drawbacks.

Cloud Failures Do Happen

41% of solutions for handling Postgres failover and redundancy management are built into cloud provider solutions; it is worth noting that 21% of survey respondents directly experienced cloud region failures in the past 12 months that exceeded downtime goals. This problem is specific to the cloud and the nature of how it operates; if uptime is a hard requirement for your organization, you should consider the implementation of solutions such as multi-cloud or multi-region deployments.

Among organizations with built-in cloud solutions, the list of cloud providers is topped by AWS.

  • AWS RDS: 55%

  • AWS cross-region backups: 55%

  • AWS Aurora Global Database: 45%

  • Azure Cosmos DB: 29%

  • Google Cloud SQL: 24%

  • Other cloud provider technologies: 12%

Postgres has the Ecosystem Advantage

Postgres extensibility is what separates it from other commercial options on the market. Extensibility means you're not locked into a single vendor's vision of your database requirements.

  • Need to add time-series capabilities? TimescaleDB extends Postgres without breaking compatibility.

  • Want full-text search? Postgres' built-in features rival dedicated search engines.

  • Interested in vector similarity search? pgvector (and many others, including pgvectorscale and pgai) handles AI workloads at scale.

But here's the critical part: stick with extensions that maintain Postgres compatibility. Avoid solutions that require proprietary SQL syntax or lock you into specific deployment patterns. The power of Postgres is that it remains Postgres, regardless of how you extend it.

For distributed deployments and high availability scenarios, solutions like pgEdge provide multi-master replication while maintaining full Postgres compatibility. You get the benefits of a distributed system without the vendor lock-in or learning curve of platform-specific alternatives.

Enterprise-Grade Availability

If you have an enterprise or project with a use case for 99.99% of high availability and above, Postgres can deliver on your requirements. pgEdge Enterprise Postgres is a great example of a robust Postgres ecosystem that delivers low latency, ultra-high availability, redundancy, and reliability. When you consider a solution like pgEdge, you'll find you can run fully open, fully distributed Postgres with advantages over other database alternatives, such as Oracle's GoldenGate, CockroachDB, or AWS RDS. pgEdge Enterprise Postgres comes without vendor lock-in or the steep learning curves associated with platform-specific SQL syntax, or other obstacles to seamless integration.

More Than Just "Good Enough"

Postgres is no longer just "good enough"; it does so much more, and the thriving community behind the project ensures that it will continue to adjust to handle modern day use cases for years to come. Have specific requests or things you'd like to see implemented in the project? Consider contributing time and/or code to the Postgres project and be the change you want to see.

The question isn't whether Postgres can handle your critical workloads; companies across every industry have already proven it can. The question is whether you're ready to make the move.

When failure truly isn't an option, Postgres delivers. The technology is robust, the community is strong, the ecosystem is growing, and the operational costs are predictable. What's taking you so long to make the switch and join us?