How We Migrated from Heroku Postgres to AWS RDS

Description and use

Migrated from Heroku Postgres to AWS RDS PostgreSQL with minimal downtime, better performance, and lower costs.

Heroku Postgres was limiting scalability and cost control for a growing application.

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

1. Export data from Heroku using pg_dump with --no-owner and --no-privileges flags.
2. Create a new PostgreSQL instance on AWS RDS and configure security groups.
3. Import data into RDS using pg_restore with --no-owner and --no-privileges flags.
4. Update application configuration to point to the new RDS endpoint.
5. Verify data integrity and application functionality.
6. Switch traffic to the new database and decommission the Heroku instance.

We exported the database using pg_dump with the --no-owner and --no-privileges flags to avoid permission conflicts.

We imported the dump into RDS using pg_restore with the same flags.

After switching the connection string, we observed no application errors and the database performed better.