Screaming in the Cloud · 2025-09-18 · 44 min
Brian Scanlan, Senior Principal Engineer at Intercom, the company building Fin.ai , joins Corey Quinn on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss Intercom’s move from AWS Aurora to PlanetScale’s managed Vitess after years of scaling challenges with their Ruby on Rails monolith. He explains how 13 Aurora clusters created operational pain and why PlanetScale’s white-glove, partnership-driven model won out over Amazon’s building-block approach. The discussion also covers Intercom’s volunteer-based on-call system, their pivot to AI agents after ChatGPT’s launch, concerns about the shrinking pipeline of systems engineers, and how companies like PlanetScale and Snowflake are outpacing AWS by delivering superior user experiences. About Brian: Brian is an engineer based in Intercom’s Dublin office. He fixes problems, builds things, and grows people. Show Highlights (01:34) The Digital Clippy Rant (2:16) The Good Chatbot vs. Bad Chatbot (03:51) The AI Chatbot Revolution (04:33) Unexpected Consequences of Good Chatbots (05:42) AI Support vs.
Other episodes covering the same guests and topics, from across The B2B Podcast Index.
115: Rethinking AI Governance for Enterprise Adoption with Dr. Markus SchmidbergerUsing AI at Work · on AWS92 / 100
Why your research needs a “thinking cave” with Sarah KlingThe Curiosity Current: A Market Research Podcast · on Amazon89 / 100
He quit Stripe and hit $10M ARR in 4 years - with $0 marketing spend. | Anurag Goel, Founder of RenderA Product Market Fit Show · on AWS89 / 100
512. Is SpaceX Over or Undervalued, Why Consensus Kills, How Chewy Beat Amazon, and the GameStop Saga from a Board Member (Larry Cheng)The Full Ratchet (TFR) · on Amazon86 / 100
From Amazon to Arm: The Blueprint for Scaling Tech Giants with Jason ChildSecrets of Rockstar CFOs · on Amazon85 / 100
Slow Decisions Are Killing Your eCommerce Business - Alex PospekhovThe eCom Ops Podcast · on Amazon85 / 100
When AI Starts Writing the Pull Requests with Madelyn Olson77 / 100
The Appalachian Cloud Trail: Hiking, Cloud Economics, and Finding Perspective62 / 100
Coding Agents, Chaos, and the Future of Dev Work with Dexter Horthy73 / 100
The Rise of Autonomous Ops: Inside AWS’s DevOps Agent with David Yanacek78 / 100
Building the Backbone of AI Agents: Telemetry, Open Source, and the Future of Developer Infrastructure with Brian Douglas79 / 100