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Evolving the back end storage for platform metrics

A peek behind the curtain at an infrastructure upgrade Heroku completed last year, migrating to a new-and-improved storage backend for platform metrics.

Proactively doing these kinds of behind-the-scenes uplifts is one of the most important ways that we keep Heroku boring: staying ahead of problems by continuously making things more secure, more reliable, and more efficient for our customers. Once the plan was made and the code was written, all that remained was the minor task of swapping out the backend storage of a high-scale, high-throughput distributed system without anyone noticing (just kidding, this was obviously going to be the hard part of the job 😅). Starting with our test environments, we began to incrementally cut a small percent of queries over to only read from DynamoDB, moving carefully in case there were any reports of weird behavior that had somehow been missed by our science experiment.

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