Why Netflix Broke Up With Self-Managed Postgres
28% cost savings. 75% faster responses. Zero regrets. Here's what happened.
I write about databases the good, the bad, and the why is this query taking 30 seconds? Today, I’m sharing one of the biggest PostgreSQL migration stories of 2025: how Netflix moved from self-managed Postgres to Aurora.
By the 2020s, Netflix had a problem that many growing tech companies face: database sprawl.
Their backend architecture had ballooned to hundreds of microservices, each with its own database needs. The Online Data Stores (ODS) team found themselves juggling multiple self-managed PostgreSQL clusters on AWS EC2, including some licensed distributed PostgreSQL forks that added complexity and cost.
The result? Operational pain everywhere.
if you’re running databases at any serious scale, there’s a lot to learn here.
The Breaking Point
Here’s what Netflix’s infrastructure team was dealing with daily:
Manual everything.
Inconsistent processes.
Expertise spread thin.
Nightmares. Routine tasks like patching, scaling, and failover were manual and time-consuming. Engineers spent more time babysitting databases than building features.
The bottom line: Netflix’s data tier wasn’t as self-service or reliable as they wanted it to be.
In their own words:
“The infrastructure team was burdened with self-managed databases on Amazon EC2, consuming valuable time with operational overhead from deployments, patching, scaling, and maintenance activities while facing rising licensing costs. The developer experience was equally impacted from this fragmented approach. Engineers faced inconsistent database deployment processes across multiple engines, which slowed application development.”
Sound familiar? If you’ve ever managed PostgreSQL at scale, you probably felt that in your chest.
The Decision: Aurora PostgreSQL
Netflix evaluated their options and made a bold choice: consolidate everything onto Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL.
Why Aurora? It offered them the best of both worlds the familiar PostgreSQL ecosystem they already knew, combined with AWS handling all the operational complexity they wanted to escape.
The key selling points were compelling:
Managed scaling and high availability. Aurora’s architecture separates storage and compute, handling replication automatically across multiple availability zones. No more managing RAFT consensus. No more orchestrating failovers manually. Replicas can take over in under 100 milliseconds, and storage scales automatically.
Performance that actually improved. This wasn’t a good enough trade-off. Aurora writes log records directly to distributed storage and optimizes memory usage, achieving higher throughput and lower latency than Netflix’s previous setup.
Global reach built in. Aurora Global Database meant Netflix could serve read traffic closer to users worldwide without building custom replication solutions.
The Results: Better Than Expected
The PostgreSQL migration didn’t just solve their operational problems it made everything faster.
Spinnaker’s metadata service saw average latency drop from 67 milliseconds to 42 milliseconds. Maximum latencies dropped by 70%, eliminating those frustrating spikes that made developers want to throw their laptops.
Policy Engine, an internal tool, saw specific heavy queries speed up by 4×. One query that took 26.7 milliseconds now completes in just 6.5 milliseconds.
Overall response times improved by up to 75% for some internal services.
And the cost savings? 28% reduction in their relational data store spending. Aurora’s pay-as-you-go model and better resource utilization (replicas share storage) meant less waste.
But the biggest win might be harder to quantify: engineering time reclaimed.
One Netflix engineer put it perfectly:
“We no longer have to build and deploy custom binaries on EC2... switching to managed Aurora PostgreSQL lets us focus on business logic and data access patterns.”
Aurora handles backups automatically (up to 35 days retention to S3). Patching happens without engineer intervention. Disaster recovery is built in, not bolted on.
I don’t know about you, but disaster recovery built in, not bolted on is the kind of thing that lets me sleep better at night.
The Lessons for the Rest of Us
Netflix’s experience teaches us something important: architecture isn’t just about raw performance. It’s about maintainability.
They traded some control for a lot of productivity and got better performance as a bonus. That’s a rare win-win in engineering.
Here’s what I think we can take away:
Managed doesn’t mean less powerful. The assumption that self-managed always equals better performance is outdated. Aurora actually outperformed their custom setup. Let that sink in.
Consolidation pays dividends. Fewer database solutions means deeper expertise, consistent practices, and less cognitive load on your teams.
Set clear evaluation criteria. Netflix weighed performance, developer productivity, reliability, and cost equally. They didn’t just chase benchmarks they looked at the whole picture.
Measure everything. They had clear before-and-after metrics that proved the migration’s value. This made the business case undeniable. If you’re planning a similar move, start measuring now.
PostgreSQL scales. Combined with cloud-native infrastructure, PostgreSQL handles even Netflix-sized workloads efficiently. The ecosystem’s robustness continues to impress year after year.
The Bigger Picture
Here’s what I keep coming back to:
PostgreSQL is becoming the backbone of mission-critical applications. From startups to Netflix-scale enterprises, organizations are betting their business on Postgres and winning.
But if managing PostgreSQL yourself feels overwhelming, that’s okay. You don’t have to do it alone.
The managed database market has matured significantly.
Aurora is one option, but it’s far from the only one. Azure Database for PostgreSQL, Google Cloud SQL, Neon, Supabase, Crunchy Bridge, Timescale Cloud the list goes on. Each has its strengths depending on your requirements, budget, and cloud strategy.
The point isn’t which managed solution you choose.
The point is recognizing that PostgreSQL itself is the future.
Its open-source foundation, massive ecosystem, and proven reliability at scale have made it the default choice for modern applications. The giants are running on it. The startups are building on it. The tooling around it gets better every year.
So start thinking now.
Whether you manage it yourself or let someone else handle the operational burden, the question isn’t if you’ll be running PostgreSQL it’s how.
Netflix figured out their answer.
What’s yours let me know in comment section:
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The 75% latency improvement on Spinnaker is wild. Most migrations go the other direction where you trade some performance for operational simplicity, but Aurora's storage-compute split actually improved throughput here. The real insight is in the operationl burden piece tho. Babysitting failovers and manual patching is tech debt that compounds. Reclaiming that engineering time probably unlocked way more value than the 28% cost savings alone.