Ruby Melbourne: October 2025

When my PostgreSQL outgrew local NVMe storage, I moved it to a remote volume—sacrificing speed (50% read, 33% write performance). The solution? Using PostgreSQL tablespaces to strategically place indexes on the local NVMe while keeping data on remote storage. This hybrid approach nearly doubled SELECT performance on large tables, proving that smart storage architecture can reclaim speed without massive hardware upgrades.

Buildkite spent much of the last 3 years working towards the goal of migrating off of its primary PostgreSQL database, to a series of smaller database shards. This is the story of how we raced the clock to finish before the largest disk AWS could give us ran out of space.