How teams scaled AWS RDS: 4 real case studies
4 of the 73 engineering write-ups in our database mention AWS RDS in their stack. They come from 3 companies (Figma, Atlassian and Notion) and were published between 2021 and 2025. Techniques that show up most often alongside AWS RDS: horizontal sharding (2) and online migration (2). It's often paired with PostgreSQL (4). 1 of the 4 state concrete scale numbers, for example "4 million databases" (Atlassian). Each card below links to our short summary and the original post.
Migrating the Jira Database Platform to AWS Aurora
Atlassian migrated about four million Jira databases from RDS Postgres to Aurora, balancing reliability, downtime and cost.
How Figma's Databases Team Lived to Tell the Scale
Figma's nine-month effort to horizontally shard its Postgres stack using a custom query proxy and logical sharding before physical splits.
The growing pains of database architecture
How Figma moved from one Postgres instance to multiple databases by vertically partitioning table groups.
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.