CASE 136 · INLET · 2023
Heroku Postgres to Aurora, before the contract auto-renewed.
A booking platform’s application had already moved off Heroku Dynos but Heroku Postgres remained — a Standard 0-plan with auto-renewal three months out, at $14k/month. We migrated the database to Aurora Postgres with DMS continuous replication and finished the cutover in ten weeks.
Booking platform
MIGRATION
2023
RESULTS
What changed, by the numbers.
DATABASE BILL
−71%
CUTOVER WINDOW
16m
DATA VALIDATED
1.4B ROWS
FAILBACK PATH
AURORA BACKTRACK
HOW IT WENT
The auto-renewal calendar was the real deadline. Letting it renew meant another year on a tier the team had outgrown. The application was already on AWS — the database was the last piece of Heroku in the path.
DMS handled the bulk load and the CDC tail. Aurora Postgres at a much smaller cluster size handled the workload after the migration showed the over-provisioning we had been paying for on Heroku. Aurora Backtrack provided a 7-day rollback window during the migration soak.
Bill dropped 71%. Cutover window came in at 16 minutes. The auto-renewal deadline was hit with three weeks of slack. Heroku Postgres was decommissioned; the only remaining Heroku artefact was the Slack channel where the team used to coordinate Heroku issues, which got archived.
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