This is the slide deck of a talk by Alexis "Horgix" Chotard and Laurentiu Capatina presented at the MongoDB Paris User Group in June 2024 about the feedback on how PayFit move away from a monolithic hell of a self-hosted MongoDB cluster to managed alternatives. Pitch below.
March 15, 2023, 6:59 AM: a MongoDB cluster collapses. Tough luck, this cluster contains 95% of user data and is absolutely vital for even minimal operation of our application. To worsen matters, this cluster is 7 years behind on versions, is not scalable, and barely observable. Furthermore, even the data model would quickly raise eyebrows: applications communicating with each other by reading/writing in the same MongoDB documents, documents reaching the maximum limit of 16MiB with hundreds of levels of nesting, and so forth. The incident will last several days and result in the loss of many users. We've seen better scenarios.
Let's explore how PayFit found itself in this hellish situation and, more importantly, how we managed to overcome it!
On the agenda: technical stabilization, untangling data models, breaking apart a Single Point of Failure (SPOF) into several elements with a more restricted blast radius, transitioning to managed services, improving internal accesses, regaining control over risky operations, and ultimately, approaching a technical migration when it impacts all development teams.