Intercom Engineering Insights - Scale & Reliability Engineering

Introducing the Intercom Engineering Insights series.

To complement our popular "On Product" events, which give a broad view of all aspects of building world class product, we're starting a series of heavily technical focused evening events, each focusing on a specific theme which we are passionate about.

This first session will focus on Scale & Reliability Engineering, the art of high impact, product-focused software engineering, lead by an operational excellence mindset.

Good food & good beer are served from 6.15pm. Talks kick off from 7pm!

Any questions? Please mail rich@intercom.io. See you then!

Lineup:

Scaling MongoDB to one million client connections and beyond

Intercom lets you send custom data attributes about your customers. In technology terms, this means storing, processing and retrieving thousands of updates per second from hundreds of millions of users on billions of data points.

Using MongoDB as the store for this data, Niall Sheridan and Barisa Obradovic will talk about how we overcame the challenges of scaling MongoDB, helping us to keep shipping new code to production up to 100 times a day.

Scaling Elasticsearch from zero to one billion user documents

As our user base grew, so did the volume of unstructured data we needed to store and process. We also continued to come up with new product features that could be created by enabling complex, fast querying of the data. It became clear that we needed more capabilities than MongoDB alone could provide. Enter Elasticsearch, a distributed, scalable, highly available real-time search engine.

Matthew Barrington and Alexandre Gerlic will talk through our initial Elasticsearch implementation, the 3 major challenges we faced while scaling, and what we learned about operating a distributed datastore.

Faster, Safer, Easier Continuous Deployment, dozens of times a day

Ciaran Lee, CTO, says “To me, Intercom is a place where: It’s as easy as possible to ship code to production; we are never afraid to deploy; we ship ambitious projects as a series of small, safe steps”. Darragh Curran, VP of Engineering, has previously talked about how Shipping is your Company’s Heartbeat.

Eugene Kenny will talk through the mechanics and philosophies of how shipping code to production dozens of times a day actually improves our reliability, rather than threatens it.