Migrating 65,000 Databases to Amazon Aurora with Firmex | Case Study | AWS

Founded in 2006 in Toronto, Canada, Firmex facilitates secure document sharing for critical business processes such as due diligence, fundraising, litigation, and compliance. The company processes millions of sensitive documents. Over 223,000 companies in more than 180 countries rely on its software, and over 250,000 users access 20,000 new projects annually. This scale demands not only robust security and reliability but also the ability to rapidly onboard new customers and scale to meet unpredictable demand spikes during major market events.

Firmex was operating approximately 65,000 SQL Server databases across four servers in an on-premises data center. Each SQL Server instance could support only a finite number of databases, and the company was rapidly approaching that ceiling. Beyond this immediate constraint, the infrastructure required constant attention from engineering teams, who spent their time managing hardware, coordinating complex backup procedures, and troubleshooting performance issues across thousands of individual databases.

Rather than simply moving existing workloads to the cloud, Firmex chose to remove these constraints entirely by redesigning its database strategy. The company engaged AWS to reimagine its entire database architecture, transforming the migration journey into true modernization success.

“We chose AWS initially because of its positive brand reputation,” says Glenn Attridge, vice president of technology at Firmex. “After we had services running on AWS, we knew it was the right fit for our long-term strategy to migrate fully to a modern, cloud-based architecture.”

Firmex embarked on an 18-month modernization project to migrate all 65,000 SQL Server databases to Amazon Aurora for PostgreSQL, which provides high performance and availability at a global scale. To help protect against data loss, the company used AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS)—trusted by customers globally to securely migrate over 1.5 million databases with minimal downtime. This way, Firmex redesigned its architecture, moving from individual databases per customer to a multi-tenant architecture within consolidated Aurora clusters. The company completed the migration over 3 months with near-zero service disruptions to customers.

By adopting managed AWS services, Firmex freed its engineering teams from the constant burden of infrastructure maintenance that had consumed their time and creativity. The company reassigned its database engineers to agility teams—that is, cross-functional groups that are focused on developing new features and delivering value to customers.

Thanks to this modernization, Firmex is no longer constrained by the database limitations that it experienced with its previous architecture. “We can now scale up our infrastructure size to meet spikes in demand or troubleshoot performance issues, all without disrupting the service experience for users,” says Eric Boyer, senior lead architect at Firmex. “After the initial migration, we also made changes to optimize infrastructure sizing, which helped us reduce costs while maintaining our service level.”

After the migration, Firmex made additional performance improvements to further increase efficiency, immediately realizing cost savings. The company used the flexibility of Aurora to reduce the sizes of its eight production instances. This way, Firmex cut the operating costs for Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)—an easy-to-manage relational database service optimized for total cost of ownership—by 75 percent.

Additionally, Firmex no longer needs to manage or procure hardware to keep its services running, so it saved 125,000 dollars on annual licensing costs. The company can seamlessly scale to support new regions and customers without extensive overhead. “A couple of years ago, we had a potential customer that wanted to create hundreds of projects in a short time on our system,” says Boyer. “The previous architecture wouldn’t be able to support that. Using AWS, we can now scale up the business and the technology as well.”

Firmex has facilitated new innovations by using AWS, moving from complicated and resource-constrained services to straightforward, scalable, and decoupled ones. Its engineers can now focus on modernizing the company’s offerings and delivering more powerful capabilities to thousands of customers worldwide. Next, Firmex plans to expand into new markets using the scalable, cloud-based infrastructure it has built on AWS—all while maintaining robust, reliable service.

“By incrementally migrating our services, we can validate that our client base is comfortable and informed and that our strategic priorities remain aligned and responsive,” says Boyer. “We’re satisfied with this strategic direction and the capabilities that AWS has provided throughout the journey.”