[menthe]

This, seriously. The long-term maintenance, tribal knowledge & risks associated with this giant hack will be greater than anything they'd ever have expected. Inb4 global outage post-mortem & key-man dependency salaries.

There's no virtually no excuse not spinning up a pg pod (or two) for each tenant - heck even a namespace with the whole stack.

Embed your 4-phases migrations directly in your releases / deployments, slap a py script to manage progressive rollouts, and you're done.

Discovery is automated, blast / loss radius is reduced to the smallest denominator, you can now monitor / pin / adjust the stack for each customer individually as necessary, sort the release ordering / schedule based on client criticality / sensitivity, you can now easily geolocate the deployment to the tenant's location, charge by resource usage, and much more.

And you can still query & roll-up all of your databases at once for analytics with Trino/DBT with nothing more but a yaml inventory.

No magic, no proprietary garbage.

[nightpool]

Figma has millions of customers. The idea of having a Postgres pod for each one would be nearly impossible without completely overhauling their DB choice.

[menthe]

You are making a major conflation here. While they do millions of users, they were last reported to only have ~60k tenants.

Decently sized EKS nodes can easily hold nearly 800 pods each (as documented), that'd make it 75 nodes. Each EKS cluster supports up to 13,500 nodes. Spread in a couple of regions to improve your customer experience, you're looking at 20 EKS nodes per cluster. This is a nothingburger.

Besides, it's far from being rocket science to co-locate tenant schemas on medium-sized pg instances, monitor tenant growth, and re-balance schemas as necessary. Tenants' contracts does not evolve overnight, and certainly does not grow orders of magnitude on week over week basis - a company using Figma either has 10 seats, 100 seats, 1000, or 10,000 seats. It's easy to plan ahead for. And I would MUCH rather having to think of re-balancing a heavy hitter customer's schema to another instance every now and then (can be 100% automated too), compared to facing a business-wide SPOF, and having to hire L07+ DBAs to maintain a proprietary query parser / planner / router.

Hell, OVH does tenant-based deployments of Ceph clusters, with collocated/coscheduled SSD/HDD hardware and does hot-spot resolution. And running Ceph is significantly more demanding and admin+monitoring heavy.

[nightpool]

Reported where? Does that include a monolithic "free tenant" that would be larger than thousands of their other tenants put together? Every Figma user has their own personal workspace along with the workspace of any organizations they may be invited to

[asguy]

Thousands of directories over thousands of installations? It’s not that far fetched.