February 12, 2025, marks a significant milestone for Plaid as they transitioned their majority of services from AWS Aurora MySQL to TiDB with minimal service disruption. The move was driven by several key reasons, including reliability challenges, slow developer velocity, high maintenance burden, sharding and scalability requirements, and the impending deprecation of MySQL 5.7. By adopting a structured approach, Plaid's Storage team successfully transitioned dozens of services to TiDB, achieving an average cutover time of one week per service with under 60 seconds of write downtime. The journey highlights the importance of careful planning, automation, and iteration in making database platform replacements easier and less prone to errors. By centralizing work, automating common operations, standardizing everything, and implementing dynamic runbooks, Plaid's team was able to achieve a faster pace without sacrificing reliability. The experience serves as a blueprint for other organizations looking to modernize their data infrastructure and can be applied to various database platforms, including TiDB.