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Many conference talks have been created from engineers splitting services out of dusty old monolith apps. However, @Intercominc did the exact opposite - they moved multiple services back into their monolith and got huge productivity and reliability wins, allowing them to ship better features to their customers. Senior Principal Systems Engineer Brian Scanlan covers the reasons why these services existed in the first place, why they felt the need to move them into their monolith, whether the moves back into the monolith were successful and what they learned along the way, including which parts of Ruby on Rails helped or hindered them! Links: https://rubyonrails.org/ #RailsWorld #RubyonRails #rails #Rails7 #opensource #monolith #microservices
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In this talk delivered at Rails World 2023, Brian Scanlan, Senior Principal Systems Engineer at Intercom, shares the company's journey from building microservices back to a monolithic architecture using Ruby on Rails. **Key Points Discussed:** - **Initial Architecture:** Intercom, a B2B SaaS company, initially started with a monolithic architecture but faced challenges that led to the creation of microservices as the company grew. These challenges included maintaining product-market fit, inconsistent coding standards, and deployment issues. - **Shift to Microservices:** The decision to break away from the monolith was influenced by trends and talks within the engineering community, leading to the development of various standalone services and applications. - **Complexity of Microservices:** As the architectural complexity grew, the team encountered significant difficulties with scalability and integration, including MySQL limitations and the challenges of maintaining multiple services. - **Return to Monolith:** Eventually, the company recognized the advantages of integrating back certain services into their monolith, which led to improved productivity and operational efficiency. They began the process of consolidating various functionalities that had been previously decoupled. - **Technological Evolution:** Intercom's architecture evolved significantly over the years, migrating from Heroku to AWS for better scalability and introducing new database systems like DynamoDB for enhanced performance. - **Investment in Monitoring:** A shift towards increased observability and monitoring allowed teams to focus on product development instead of maintaining disparate services, marking a definitive improvement in operational capabilities. **Conclusions:** Ultimately, Intercom's experience underscores the potential benefits of a well-structured monolithic architecture, even in a landscape that highly advocates for microservices. Brian emphasizes that as Intercom continues to grow, the focus will remain on optimizing their architecture to support future innovations efficiently.
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