Taming the Beast: Safely Managing Database Operations in Rails in a Team of 100s

Intercom leverages Rails to empower hundreds of engineers to move fast and make the changes they need in production without a lengthy centralized review process. But allowing arbitrary migrations to run across hundreds of tables and hundreds of terabytes of data in MySQL comes with inherent risks. In this session, we’ll look at where we came from, what changes we've made to reduce risk and enable people to move fast while safely leveraging Rails’ power, and where we're going in the future.