While Postgres Redlined, Robinhood Sharded to Scale

The alarm went off at 6:20am. I rolled out of bed, opened my laptop, and pulled up Grafana. Equity markets open at 6:30 and I hoped last night’s fixes would hold. I watched request and order counts, comparing them to a week ago when things ran fine. Slack was already buzzing with engineers also checking metrics. The clock flipped to 6:30. The first metric tick came in, spiking the graphs. Okay,…