OpenAI: Scaling PostgreSQL to 800 Million ChatGPT Users

OpenAI manages a massive **PostgreSQL infrastructure** to support hundreds of millions of users by utilizing a **single-primary architecture** with dozens of global read replicas. To maintain stability under extreme traffic, the engineering team implemented **rigorous query optimizations**, connection pooling through **PgBouncer**, and aggressive caching strategies. They mitigate the limitations of a single writer by migrating **write-heavy workloads** to sharded systems like **Azure Cosmos DB** and enforcing strict rate limits. High availability is ensured through **regional workload isolation** and the use of hot standbys to prevent total service outages. This technical evolution allows the platform to process **millions of queries per second** while maintaining low latency and high reliability. Future scaling plans include testing **cascading replication** to expand their global database footprint even further.

Source:

https://openai.com/index/scaling-postgresql/