Aurora vs RDS Postgres: Atlassian's 4 million database migration
Published 2026-10-19 · Built only from first-party engineering write-ups in our database. Every number below comes from the linked source.
Atlassian's 2025 post is the direct case: it migrated about four million Jira databases from RDS Postgres to Aurora, balancing reliability, downtime and cost. Teams have also scaled a long way on RDS Postgres: Figma vertically partitioned and then horizontally sharded Postgres on RDS, and Notion sharded its Postgres monolith by workspace on RDS.
AWS RDS vs AWS Aurora: side by side
| AWS RDS | AWS Aurora | |
|---|---|---|
| Stories in our database | 4 | 1 |
| Companies | Atlassian, Figma and Notion | Atlassian |
| Published | 2021–2025 | 2025 |
| Techniques alongside it | horizontal sharding (2), online migration (2), connection pooling (1), cost optimization (1) | cost optimization (1), database migration (1), multi-tenancy (1) |
| Scale numbers stated in sources | 4 million databases (Atlassian) | 4 million databases (Atlassian) |
| Direct comparison story | Atlassian: Migrating the Jira Database Platform to AWS Aurora | (same story) |
Verdict
Our one direct case has an unusual shape (about four million databases). We don't have pricing data, so check AWS's pricing for your own workload.
Counts are stories in How They Scaled tagged with each side, see the AWS RDS pages. They describe what these teams wrote about, not market share or benchmark results.