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How Figma's Databases Team Lived to Tell the Scale | Figma Blog

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Our nine month journey to horizontally shard Figma’s Postgres stack, and the key to unlocking (nearly) infinite scalability. Vertical partitioning was a relatively easy and very impactful scaling lever that bought us significant runway quickly. It was also a stepping stone on the path to horizontal sharding. Figma’s database stack has grown almost 100x since 2020. This is a good problem to have because it means our business is expanding, but it also poses some tricky technical challenges. Over the past four years, we’ve made a significant effort to stay ahead of the curve and avoid potential growing pains. In 2020, we were running a single Postgres database hosted on AWS’s largest physical instance, and by the end of 2022, we had built out a distributed architecture with caching, read replicas, and a dozen vertically partitioned databases. We split groups of related tables—like “Figma files” or “Organizations”—into their own vertical partitions, which allowed us to make incremental sca

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