Run Less Software; Use Less Bits
summary
Intercom adopts the rule “run less software, use less bits” and keeps to a small set of standard technologies plus outsourced services using four outsourced tiers to protect customer data inside the AWS VPC. Migrations to AWS Aurora deliver 5x throughput and ~30% cost savings; a rewrite moving a billion-row frequent-update store off MongoDB into Aurora+DynamoDB with Ruby glue cuts cost by 90% and frees three engineers. A web-first messenger experiment fails for people/process reasons, so some systems (bare-metal Elasticsearch, real-time protocol) remain owned.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (8)
- 0:00Intro
- 1:02The war of attrition
- 6:18The Matrix
- 7:34Choose Standard Technology
- 10:06Engineering Decision Formula
- 12:08Outsourcing
- 15:03Ownership
- 16:02In Action
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