/CASE STUDY/

Reddit Migrates Databases To Amazon Aurora

With the number of users increasing by more than 30% per year, Reddit faces challenges in ensuring quality service provision to users, in this case, they have to hire more engineers or invest in more resources to meet this increased amount of data. However, there is another option to switch to a fully-managed relational database […]

With the number of users increasing by more than 30% per year, Reddit faces challenges in ensuring quality service provision to users, in this case, they have to hire more engineers or invest in more resources to meet this increased amount of data. However, there is another option to switch to a fully-managed relational database service. In this case study, it’s Amazon Aurora.

About Reddit

Reddit is a website that aggregates a variety of fields from entertainment, social media services to online news and especially information technology.

Founded in 2005 by two college friends, Reddit is one of the most visited social media sites in the world. 430 million monthly active users globally share interests, news and entertainment stories, etc. in 130,000 active communities that generate more than 30 billion monthly views.

When it comes to Reddit, it’s about two words: “share.” Photos, news, funny videos, community questions,… – are indispensable components of Reddit.

reddit aws migration

About Amazon Aurora

Amazon Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud, that combines the performance and availability of traditional enterprise databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases.

Amazon Aurora is up to five times faster than standard MySQL databases and three times faster than standard PostgreSQL databases. It provides the security, availability, and reliability of commercial databases at 1/10th the cost. Amazon Aurora is fully managed by Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), which automates time-consuming administration tasks like hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups.

Read more: https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/

amazon aurora

Why Reddit uses Amazon Aurora

“Using Aurora, we can build a longer-term strategy of how data is processed and think more strategically for long-term projects.”

Reddit has operated the majority of the platform’s infrastructure on AWS since 2009. The Reddit platform uses PostgresSQL databases running on Amazon EC2 instances and uses Amazon S3 to support data storage that provides Reddit.com and their native mobile applications.

As their user numbers continued to grow, the architecture could no longer afford to be responsive and effective enough to follow their agile methods, and as a result, Reddit decided to switch to Amazon Aurora, one of the AWS Serverless services where you don’t need to manage instances at all.

Amazon Aurora and Amazon Web Services have given Reddit the following benefits:

  • The ability to manage databases at scale to support 30% growth over the years.

  • Reduce the operational burden on engineers and increase their productivity.

  • Improves database reliability.

  • Speed up point-in-time recovery.

  • Fast automatic backup conversion takes about 30 seconds.

Reddit’s Database Migration process to Aurora

Reddit began its migration process in January 2020. Migrating 24 PostgreSQL databases across EC2 instances via Amazon Aurora is an extremely frightening task due to data crashes or losses that can occur at any time. However, with PostgreSQL’s Native Logical Replication technology in Aurora compatible with Logical Replication, it helps to regenerate the database without any conversion.

After the data was copied, the Reddit team tested Amazon Aurora in their production environment for functionality and high performance. They then perform a write cutover, but the cutover does not cause any downtime because EC2 and Aurora have the same set of APIs.

Amazon Aurora also allows Reddit engineers to restore at a faster time and restore backups along with allowing data clones to be used to easily provide data to other teams for analysis or testing.

Summary

Moving from self-managed PostgreSQL on Amazon EC2 to Aurora is a key component of Reddit’s success.

With the decision to choose another database service to meet the hundreds of millions of active users each month, Reddit has shown a good choice when using Amazon Aurora, both meeting factors such as High Reliability and responding to rapid database changes. , Support backup and restore faster, Point-in-time recovery, Quick backup conversion, and Improve productivity for engineers, both improve the quality of the Reddit platform for users and do not experience any downtime when converting.

Now, Harvey and his team can focus more on long-term, high-value goals such as reconsidering their data storage strategies and focusing less on administrative tasks.

About VTI Cloud

VTI Cloud is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, with a team of over 50+ AWS certified solution engineers. With the desire to support customers in their digital transformation and transportation journey to the AWS cloud, VTI Cloud is proud to be a pioneer in solution consulting, software development, and AWS infrastructure deployment for customers in Vietnam and Japan.

Building safe, high-performance, flexible, and cost-optimized architectures for customers is VTI Cloud’s top mission in the mission of enterprise technology.