Aurora PostgreSQL limitless database: Building a highly scalable OLTP database
2026
We present Aurora Limitless Database, a cloud-native distributed database system that extends Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL with horizontal scaling capabilities while maintaining strong consistency guarantees. The system provides transparent scalability using a router layer for query distribution and a storage layer of PostgreSQL shards, which eliminates the need for application-level sharding. Our key technical contributions include a distributed transaction protocol that integrates time-based multi-version concurrency control with two-phase commit, an adaptive scaling framework that combines vertical and horizontal scaling, and a distributed query processing engine that maintains strong consistency across both DML and DDL operations. Aurora Limitless Database achieves near-linear scalability for a variety of production workloads, reaching millions of transactions per second while maintaining millisecond-level latencies. The system automatically optimizes resource allocation through serverless capabilities and dynamic sharding, significantly reducing operational costs compared to static provisioning. This approach enables scalable OLTP applications to leverage PostgreSQL's rich feature set without sacrificing consistency and without the administrative burden of provisioning and managing multiple systems.
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