"With 50TB of production data moving from self-managed EC2 MySQL to Amazon Aurora, Patreon could not afford the downtime associated with a traditional lift and shift approach. The team employed a defensive migration strategy, establishing a replication stream to the new Aurora cluster while keeping the legacy EC2 cluster active as a fail-safe. This architectural redundancy proved critical; when an obscure configuration in Aurora's general.log caused latency spikes on the new primary, the team triggered an instant failback to the EC2 legacy path,"
"The review details 12 major projects, revealing three core architectural themes: resilient migration patterns, data model refactoring for cardinality, and consistency trade-offs in distributed systems. Similarly, the removal of a legacy React Router, entangled in years of technical debt, required a Gatekeeper pattern. Lacking institutional knowledge of the legacy code, engineers built specific observability and feature-flagging infrastructure first. This allowed them to route traffic incrementally to the new Next.js architecture, verifying parity before decommissioning the old router."
Patreon prioritized perfective maintenance and brownfield evolution while supporting over 300,000 active creators and more than 10 million paying members. Engineering work concentrated on 12 major projects exposing three architectural themes: resilient migration patterns, data-model refactoring for cardinality, and consistency trade-offs in distributed systems. A defensive migration moved 50TB from EC2 MySQL to Amazon Aurora using replication to a new cluster while keeping the legacy EC2 cluster as a fail-safe, enabling instant failback when Aurora latency spikes occurred. Replacing a legacy React Router used a Gatekeeper pattern with observability and feature-flagging to route traffic incrementally to Next.js and verify parity before decommissioning.
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