Zero downtime: 4 real scaling case studies
4 of the 73 engineering write-ups in our database are tagged with the technique "zero downtime". They come from 4 companies (Meta, Notion, Shopify and Stripe) and were published between 2021 and 2026. 2 of the 4 state concrete scale numbers, for example "1.5 PB" (Stripe). Each card below links to our short summary and the original post.
Shipping Media Over QUIC at Meta Scale for Instagram Live Ingest
Instagram Live ingest moved from Meta's in-house RUSH protocol to the open IETF Media over QUIC standard on iOS and Android. Edge endpoints translate MoQ frames into the RUSH format, so the backend did not change. Server-side routing let the experiment resize in minutes, the transport falls back to TCP when UDP is blocked, and the launch matched RUSH on quality and reliability.
How Stripe's document databases supported 99.999% uptime with zero-downtime data migrations
Stripe's DocDB and its Data Movement Platform move data between shards without downtime.
The Great Re-shard: adding Postgres capacity (again) with zero downtime
Notion tripled its Postgres fleet by re-sharding with logical replication and careful PgBouncer cutovers, with no downtime.
Shard Balancing: Moving Shops Confidently with Zero-Downtime at Terabyte-scale
Shopify rebalances MySQL shards by moving individual shops online with its Ghostferry tool.