At small scale any log store works; at scale the invoice decides, not the feature list. The four dominant logging backends make fundamentally different storage bets that fix their cost-per-GB and what queries are even fast. A deep dive on the index-everything camp versus the cheap-storage camp, and the ingest discipline that beats all of them.
Elasticsearch
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Modern Logging Architecture: Loki, Splunk, Elasticsearch, ClickHouse, and the Cost-Per-GB That Decides Everything -
OpenSearch in Production Index lifecycle management, shard sizing decisions, dashboards, alerting, k-NN neural search, the OpenSearch vs Elasticsearch question in 2026, and running OpenSearch on Kubernetes.
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PostgreSQL Full-Text Search vs Elasticsearch: Where the Line Actually Is tsvector/tsquery, pg_trgm fuzzy matching, ranking and highlighting, multilingual support, and an honest answer to when Postgres FTS is enough and when you actually need a dedicated search engine.