Migrating hundreds of databases sounds like a job for a large, specialized team. Plaid did it with six engineers, most without deep database expertise, moving 234 databases across 100 services from Amazon Aurora MySQL to self-hosted TiDB in two and a half years.
In this webinar, Plaid Platform Architecture Lead Zander Hill shares the leadership playbook behind the project: How his team turned resource constraints into an advantage, earned organizational buy-in for a multi-year re-platforming effort, and built compounding automation that made each migration faster and more reliable than the last.
You’ll discover how Plaid categorized services by business criticality to avoid over-engineering, chose controlled cutovers with 60 to 120 seconds of writer downtime over zero-downtime complexity, and frontloaded their riskiest Tier 0 services to de-risk the entire program. The result: Zero downtime across three TiDB upgrades in 2025, each costing only four engineer weeks compared to 12 on Amazon Aurora.
