Yes, hivemind requires a postgres database. You need a steemd node or nodes that contain all plugins except for tags/follows. We use jussi for routing, which is a custom reverse proxy and caching layer.
Everything has official docker images available and could be set up to run together with docker-compose.
Well, I’m not a developer guy, I just wanna figure out how much you save on old rpc node vs new set of nodes delta.
With the cost of instances with lots of RAM being very high and fast disk being relatively cheap, quite a lot.