Evolving Intercom’s database infrastructure
Intercom is rolling out a major evolution of our database architecture moving to Vitess – a scalable, open-source MySQL clustering system – managed by PlanetScale.
For many years, Intercom has used Amazon Aurora MySQL as our default database. With the addition of our custom sharding solution for high scale data, Aurora MySQL has allowed us to scale our databases with relative ease. It has supported hundreds of terabytes (TB) of data, 1.5 million reads per second, and tens of thousands of writes per second. Aurora MySQL has served us well as the source of truth for the majority of Intercom’s most critical production data.
For our customers, when Intercom is down, critical parts of their business are affected. They expect flawless uptime, and so do we, even accounting for unforeseen disruptions or planned database maintenance. Our own teams – including Customer Support, Sales, Product, Engineering, IT, and more – rely heavily on our platform every day. An outage doesn’t just impact our customers; it impacts us directly. We deeply understand the importance of reliability because we experience it firsthand.
In late 2023, as we reviewed our database architecture, several factors led us to seek improvements: enhancing the customer experience, addressing operational friction, and keeping pace with a shifting database landscape.
