This podcast episode features Sammy Steele, a senior staff engineer at Figma, who discusses her experience working at Dropbox and her transition to Figma. She highlights the importance of databases in enabling Figma's real-time collaborative browser experience and the challenges faced in scaling their infrastructure. The concept of horizontal sharding is introduced as a solution to handle exponential growth, and the speaker emphasizes the need for safe and reliable database migrations. The implementation of cross-shard transactions and the decision process for handling high-risk transactions are discussed. The section concludes with insights on application readiness testing, the architecture of the database system using sharding, and the challenges and progress made in failover and migration operations. The importance of vacuuming to prevent database failures and the challenges faced with large tables are also addressed. The speaker shares their experience with MySQL and Postgres and highlights the importance of a managed solution in database management. The episode concludes with a discussion of future plans, including addressing reliability risks and building a more robust future.
