Scaling RDS Postgres for Peak Christmas Traffic (#1 in U.S. App Store)

📌 Overview On Christmas Day 2024, Postgres infrastructure powering the Aura Frames API had problems under peak load, being unavailable for three hours and disrupting the experience for new customers. Aura wanted to do better for 2025. One year later, much of the resource intensive data access was reworked, the Postgres infrastructure was upsized, and this approach not only survived, but thrived, providing reliable Postgres through the holiday season. Total Queries per second (QPS) peaked at 225,000 (226K TPS), with 100K QPS sustained over 10 hours for multiple days, and an average response time of 25 microseconds. The improved reliability meant customers could smoothly set up new frames and add photos, and they did it more than ever, with the Aura Frames app reaching #1 in U.S. and Canadian Apple and Android App Stores on Christmas Day. In this post we’ll look behind the scenes at months of engineering planning and execution that went into achieving that! A follow-up post will dig…