Data & Storage Case Studies

Real-world Data & Storage case studies: what happened in production, the architecture behind it, the numbers and the lessons to take to your own team.

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  1. How a B2B SaaS Company Turned a Swampy S3 Data Lake into a Lakehouse with Apache Iceberg

    A 120-engineer SaaS company replaced a brittle Hive-metastore S3 lake with Apache Iceberg, cutting query costs 68% and eliminating overnight partition repair jobs that blocked analysts for hours.

    Data & Storage · advanced · 12 min read

  2. How a B2B SaaS Team Cut Postgres P99 Latency by 73% with Pooling, Replicas and Partitioning

    An overloaded single Postgres instance was killing checkout latency. Connection pooling, read replicas, and time-based table partitioning brought P99 from 4.2 s to 1.1 s without a rewrite.

    Data & Storage · intermediate · 12 min read

  3. How a B2B SaaS Team Migrated 8 TB from Self-Managed MySQL to Aurora with Zero Downtime

    A 120-engineer SaaS company moved 8 TB of MySQL data to Aurora MySQL with no service interruption, using DMS continuous replication, schema versioning, and a traffic-shifting cutover that took under 4 minutes.

    Data & Storage · advanced · 12 min read

  4. How Discord Migrated Trillions of Messages from Cassandra to ScyllaDB

    Discord's Cassandra cluster hit latency and hotspot limits at trillions of messages; a full migration to ScyllaDB cut p99 latency and reduced node count from 177 to 72.

    Data & Storage · advanced · 12 min read

  5. How Figma Scaled Postgres from One Overloaded Database to Vertical Partitioning and Horizontal Sharding

    Figma's single Postgres instance hit its vertical scaling ceiling as product growth exploded. The team escaped by vertically partitioning tables across logical databases, then horizontally sharding the largest ones.

    Data & Storage · advanced · 12 min read

  6. The 2017 GitLab Database Deletion: When Five Backup Methods All Failed at Once

    A tired engineer ran rm -rf on the wrong server, wiping GitLab.com's production PostgreSQL data. Five separate backup systems all failed to produce a usable restore, leaving 6 hours of data permanently lost.

    Data & Storage · intermediate · 12 min read

  7. The GitHub October 2018 Outage: How 43 Seconds of Network Partition Caused 24 Hours of Data Inconsistency

    A 43-second network partition between GitHub's US East Coast data centers caused Orchestrator to promote a new MySQL primary, splitting writes across two nodes and triggering 24 hours of degraded service.

    Data & Storage · advanced · 12 min read