Guarding The Majestic Monolith

This month we're very excited to bring you talks on majestic monoliths by Brian Scanlan and multitenant security by Miles McGuire from Intercom. It has been a whopping five and a half years since we've been hosted by Intercom and they will be kindly sponsoring the drinks and pizza. Back then one of the topics for the evening also featured majestic monoliths, so it is great to see that this approach has stood the test of time and many battles. Join us to learn how and more...

### "Monolith-ifying perfectly good microservices" by Brian Scanlan

Intercom primarily runs on a majestic Ruby on Rails monolith, alongside standalone services for key customer functions. However, in recent years, some of these individual services were folded back into the monolith. How and why? In his talk, Brian will answer these burning questions, and also discuss which aspects of Ruby on Rails supported this monolithification along with those that presented obstacles!

Brian is a Senior Principal Systems Engineer in Intercom’s Dublin office - fixing problems, building things and growing people.

### "Guardrails - Keeping Customer Data Separate in a Multi Tenant System" by Miles McGuire

Many companies use a multitenant architecture where customers share resources like databases, caches and more. Each company's data is kept private through safeguards. However, sometimes these safeguards can be wrongly implemented. To address this, Miles and his team integrated customer IDs into all tasks and added middleware to prevent unauthorized access. This solution improved security and yielded extra advantages. Miles will discuss their approach, lessons learned, and the additional benefits gained.

Miles is Staff Engineer on Intercom’s Datastores team, which owns all core technologies, including Rails.

We are very grateful to Intercom for hosting and sponsoring this meetup, including food and beverages.

Note: Doors at Intercom open at 6:00pm, pizza at 6:20pm and talks start at 7pm. Afterwards, we'll look to find a nearby establishment for us all to catch up until about 10pm - if you don't need to hightail it out of town!

Minimum age limit to attend is 18 years.