Those are questions where the answer depends a lot on what you're using the database for and what your requirements are. I'm not the best person to evaluate how

Those are questions where the answer depends a lot on what you're using the database for and what your requirements are. I'm not the best person to evaluate how much of a "hassle" setting up things has been, since I'm quite comfortable administering PostgreSQL nowadays, so I'm biased. When setting up backups you'll want to know what you're backing up and how to restore it; Do you need to be able to restore to an arbitrary point in time, or to a snapshot of the data at the time of backup? Or do you need to be able to perform partial restores? For HA, you'll at least need to specify if any data loss is acceptable; whether the system should perform automatic recovery in the event of a real failure, or if the HA merely exists for operational purposes where failovers are controlled events. For example. PostgreSQL streaming replication is reliable and easy to understand, but it's asynchronous by default and you do need to monitor that the replica stays current with the primary. It's just fine as is for basic operational HA so that you can perform maintenance with minimal (seconds) downtime, but if you want a fancy autohealing system that guarantees commits are never lost, you'll likely need a more complicated setup with synchronous replication and real clustering software. Generally, the stricter your requirements get (and the more data you deal with), the more effort it takes to implement it yourself.