Scaling Rails at Aura Frames: Splitting to 8 Primary DBs and Reaching #1 in the App Store | Software Engineer, Author, High Performance PostgreSQL for Rails

Ruby on Rails has helped make it possible to scale out the database layer, meeting the demands of millions of Aura Frames customers enjoying their digital photo frames. In late 2025, the team added additional primary databases to expand capacity for peak write and read load ahead of Christmas Day, the busiest day of the year for the company. Rails manages queries and schema changes for each primary database within the same codebase, and now with the additional capacity of many primary databases. With 8 primary databases in total, each server instance can be vertically scaled ahead of peak load. When load returns to normal levels, instances are scaled down for cost savings.