How We Migrated from Heroku Postgres to AWS RDS

Description and use

Migrating from Heroku Postgres to AWS RDS PostgreSQL improved scalability and reduced costs.

Heroku Postgres was limiting scalability and cost control for Wootric’s growing database needs.

The migration completed with minimal downtime, improved performance, and reduced monthly database costs.

1. Assessed current Heroku Postgres usage and identified key performance metrics.
2. Selected AWS RDS PostgreSQL as target platform and configured instance size and storage.
3. Created a snapshot of the Heroku database and exported it to a .sql file using pg_dump.
4. Imported the dump into RDS using psql, ensuring schema compatibility.
5. Configured RDS parameters (max_connections, work_mem, etc.) for production workload.
6. Updated application connection strings to point to the new RDS endpoint.
7. Performed data integrity checks and load testing to validate migration.
8. Decommissioned the old Heroku Postgres instance after successful validation.

We migrated from Heroku Postgres to AWS RDS PostgreSQL to gain better scalability and cost control.

The migration involved exporting the Heroku database and importing it into RDS using pg_dump and psql.