How We Moved Quay.Io's Database From Mysql To Postgres And Lived To Tell About It
Red Hat News, Thursday, February 29th, 2024
In November 2023, the Quay.io team migrated our database from the original MySQL instance to a brand new Postgres database. While the migration process itself was fairly smooth, it was not smooth for our customers.
We experienced regular instability before and after the migration. Many of the issues we encountered were traced back to increased Quay.io traffic and differences in how MySQL and Postgres behave under load. We'd like to use this write up to share our insights and provide clarity around our recent instability.
Background
Quay.io was the first private container registry on the internet, going live in 2013. Our architecture at the time was built for large scale and easier operations, given that we were a small startup. Over the coming years, Quay.io became part of CoreOS and eventually Red Hat. Our team has grown and today Quay.io serves tens of petabytes of container images each month and is the central hub for many enterprise customers, including Red Hat's entire container catalog.