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.
Compare it with other horizontal sharding case studies, or with PlanetScale's benchmark of Neki, its sharded Postgres, at 118.5M QPS.
- Published
- 2024-03-14
- Scale
- Not stated in source
- Techniques
- horizontal sharding query proxy online migration
- 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 Figma'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 Figma'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.