Driver 01
Backup and failover burden
Engineers maintaining Patroni failover, WAL archiving and disk resizing themselves.
Migration playbook: Self-managed PostgreSQL (EC2) → Aurora PostgreSQL Serverless v2
Self-managed PostgreSQL to Aurora Serverless v2
Hand database operations — backups, failover and storage growth — to Aurora Serverless v2, with replication running until a short, rehearsed cutover.
Migration drivers
Why teams make this move
Driver 02
Replica lag
Asynchronous replicas falling behind and serving stale reads to reports.
Driver 03
Fixed provisioning
Paying for peak-sized instances that can't scale down off-peak.
Execution sequence
How the migration runs
Each phase ends with a check you can verify — data parity, error rates, latency — and the rollback path is agreed before any traffic moves.
- 01Phase
Aurora cluster in Terraform
Provisioning an Aurora PostgreSQL Serverless v2 cluster across Availability Zones, with RDS Proxy.
- 02Phase
Continuous replication
Streaming changes from the current database to Aurora with logical replication or AWS DMS.
- 03Phase
Benchmarking and validation
Load testing, and comparing query plans and latency on Aurora.
- 04Phase
Cutover
Pausing writes, confirming sequences and replication are in sync, and switching connections to RDS Proxy.
Risk prevention
Pitfalls that derail this migration
Risk 01
Parameter group mismatches
Forgetting to copy custom postgresql.conf settings (shared_buffers, work_mem) to the Aurora parameter group.
Risk 02
DMS LOB truncation
Misconfigured DMS large object settings silently truncating large text and JSON columns.
Risk 03
No connection pooling
Connecting many serverless functions straight to Aurora without RDS Proxy.
Before and after
What we measure
We take a baseline before any change and report the same numbers after cutover, from your own tools. They are the evidence of whether the migration worked — not figures promised in advance.
- Failover time
- Measured in a forced failover test before go-live
- Monthly cost
- Current instances and storage vs Aurora capacity units
- Replica lag
- Seconds behind the writer under normal load
Questions
Frequently asked migration questions
It adjusts capacity in small increments of Aurora capacity units, within the minimum and maximum you set, without dropping connections. Set the maximum with your budget in mind.
Yes. Aurora stores six copies of your data across three Availability Zones and backs up continuously to Amazon S3.
Rehearse the cutover before the real one
Tell us about your data volume, traffic and timeline. An engineer will reply within one business day to set up a call about the migration plan and its rollback path.