# Breaking the Loop: How we migrated our backup catalog for 250+ MySQL clusters to AWS

DevFeed: [Breaking the Loop: How we migrated our backup catalog for 250+ MySQL clusters to AWS](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/breaking-the-loop-how-we-migrated-our-backup-catalog-for-250-mysql-clusters-to-aws-23721.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://medium.com/booking-com-development/breaking-the-loop-how-we-migrated-our-backup-catalog-for-250-mysql-clusters-to-aws-6f5a53a519b9?source=rss----1c36c35f9c76---4>)

Author: Ioannis Androulidakis

Published: 2026-02-19T14:19:52Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [Booking.com Development - Medium](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/booking-com-development-medium.md>)

Topics: [migration](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/migration.md>), [Amazon RDS](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/amazon-rds.md>), [MySQL](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/mysql.md>), [Amazon Web Services](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/aws.md>), [backups](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/backups.md>), [Cloud](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/cloud.md>), [on-prem](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/on-prem.md>)

Tags: [amazon-rds](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/amazon-rds.md>), [aws](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/aws.md>), [backup](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/backup.md>), [cloud](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/cloud.md>), [cloud-migration](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/cloud-migration.md>), [data-backup](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/data-backup.md>), [database](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/database.md>), [databases](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/databases.md>), [migration](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/migration.md>), [mysql](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/mysql.md>), [on-prem](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/on-prem.md>), [relational-databases](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/relational-databases.md>), [reliability-engineering](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/reliability-engineering.md>)

## AI overview

Booking.com's Database Engineering team describes migrating the backup catalog orchestrator's backend for more than 250 production MySQL clusters from a self-managed on-premises MySQL database to managed Amazon RDS for MySQL in AWS. The article discusses the migration's challenges, implemented solutions, and lessons learned.

## Source excerpt

This post was originally published internally on May 9, 2025 and has been reworked for a public audience. Authors: Ioannis Androulidakis, Mohammed Gaafar Intro The Database Engineering team at Booking.com is constantly looking for ways to improve database reliability and support scaling our business. In 2025 we completed a major milestone in our effort to modernize our infrastructure: we seamlessly migrated the backend of the orchestrator that schedules and manages the daily backups of 250+ production MySQL clusters. More specifically, we moved from a self-managed MySQL database running on premises to a managed Amazon RDS MySQL database running in the cloud. This blog post delves into the challenges we faced, the solutions we implemented, and some key lessons we learned along the way. We are moving to the cloud (gradually) Cloud adoption is a journey, not a switch. Over the past few years the adoption of AWS solutions at Booking.com has been growing rapidly across different business units, allowing teams to be more autonomous, run their databases in the cloud and solve known issues with their old on-premise setup. Like customer teams, we are running our own databases to power the core services that we offer and manage databases efficiently at scale. To name a few: automatic failover of writable primaries, auto-scaling of read-only replicas, service discovery, capacity planning, online schema changes, user access management, volume backups, etc. Traditionally, the Database Engineering team has been running databases on-premises. In the emerging era of cloud databases, we wanted to compare our in-house offerings with existing cloud databases and bridge the gap between the two. Knowing that we lacked deep, hands-on experience with the operational realities of running critical infrastructure on AWS, we saw this as a unique opportunity to learn more about cloud databases while also improving the reliability of our systems. Long story short, we decided to prioritize the m