Vikram Pillai

Author

Database reliability engineer at a Hyderabad cloud company, focused on DynamoDB single-table design and Firestore at scale. Wrote the migration playbook that moved 500 M legacy MySQL records to DynamoDB without downtime.

databasesfirestorebackendarchitecture

Articles by Vikram Pillai(1)

Schema migration without downtime: a production field guide

Database migrations that require locking a table are the most common cause of self-inflicted production outages. The expand-contract pattern makes every migration safe — including the ones that look simple.

databasesmigrationdevopsbackendpostgresql

22 July 2026