Most of the main Skype services use a database platform based on PostgreSQL and other open-source technologies, such as Skytools, plProxy, pgBouncer, etc. This platform consists of several hundreds of servers with thousands of databases, which process hundreds of thousands of transactions per second. At the same time, the platform architecture allows its users (applications and their developers) to work with "logical" databases, without any worries about their real “physical” structure.

Our Skype Database Platform team is responsible for the database platform infrastructure. We develop automation systems for various processes that help us ensure service reliability and facilitate development, testing, and deployment of code. In this presentation, I will outline the database platform architecture, review its main components, and tell you about the methods we use in our every-day work to ensure high availability, scalability, replication, fault tolerance, and more.