Alessandro Salvatori, Principal Engineer at DoorDash, discussed the company's transition from Aurora Postgres to CockroachDB in response to critical database failures during peak order times. Initially, DoorDash's monolithic Python application relied on a single Aurora Postgres cluster, leading to performance bottlenecks, particularly with the primary node's write capacity. The rapidly growing user base and increased demand during the pandemic exacerbated these issues, culminating in a major outage on April 17, 2020. To address this, DoorDash began using CockroachDB, which allows all nodes to serve writes and facilitates horizontal scaling, thereby eliminating the write bottleneck. Salvatori detailed the measured approach to this transition, highlighting the development of a tool to extract tables from the main database for easier scaling and the eventual automated migration to CockroachDB, which aligned with DoorDash's scaling needs and performance goals.