Herding elephants: Lessons learned from sharding Postgres at Notion
Notion split its Postgres monolith into a fleet of logical shards keyed by workspace, using double-writes and backfills to migrate.
- Published
- 2021-10-06
- Scale
- Not stated in source
- Techniques
- horizontal sharding online migration double writes
- Stack
- PostgreSQL AWS RDS
Try this stack yourself
- Railway · Deploy something like this on Railway: spin up PostgreSQL plus your app in a few clicks. New accounts get $20 in credit (applied when you pick a paid plan).
Railway isn't part of Notion's setup in this story. It's just an easy place to try the same building blocks. - Better Stack · Monitor uptime and logs with Better Stack, and get alerted fast if a migration or traffic spike goes sideways on your own system.
Better Stack isn't part of Notion's setup in this story. It's a tool for watching your own systems while you try ideas like these.
Some links above are affiliate links: if you sign up, How They Scaled may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. We only list tools that fit the stack in the story.