Figma

Figma's Database Grew 100x in Four Years — Here's How a Small Team Kept It From Toppling

In 2020, Figma ran on a single Postgres instance on AWS's largest available machine. Four years later, that database had grown nearly 100x. Some tables had swelled to several terabytes and billions of rows. The Postgres vacuum process — the background job that keeps Postgres alive — was causing reliability incidents. They had months of runway left before hitting the IOPS ceiling. A small databases team had nine months to fix it.