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. Human Support

(05:59) The Alexa Problem and Feature Discoverability

(19:03) Amazon's Struggles Moving Up the Stack

(26:55) The Unix Networking Society Origins

(34:43) The Global On-Call Challenge

(42:09) LinkedIn: The World's Largest Porn Site

Links

Intercom: intercom.com

Brian on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scanlanb/

Brian on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/bscanlan.bsky.social

Sponsor
Wiz - Listen to Crying Out Cloud: wiz.io/crying-out-cloud

AI is rewriting the rules of code review and CodeRabbit is leading the charge. In this featured episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Harjot Gill shares with Corey Quinn how his team built the most-installed AI app on GitHub and GitLab, nailed positive unit economics, and turned code review into a powerful guardrail for the AI era.

Show Highlights

(0:00) Entrepreneurial Journey and Code Rabbit's Origin

(3:06) The Broken Nature of Code Reviews

(5:47) Developer Feedback and the Future of Code Review

(9:50) AI-Generated Code and the Code Review Burden

(11:46) Traditional Tools vs. AI in Code Review

(13:41) Keeping Up with State-of-the-Art Models

(16:16) Cloud Architecture and Google Cloud Run

(18:21) Context Engineering for Large Codebases

(20:52) Taming LLMs and Balancing Feedback
(22:30) Business Model and Open Source Strategy

About Harjot Gill

Harjot is the CEO of CodeRabbit, a leading AI-first developer tools company.

Links

• Harjot on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harjotsgill/

Sponsor
CodeRabbit: https://coderabbit.link/corey

In this episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey Quinn talks with Jonathan Schneider, CEO of Moderne and author on Java microservices and automated code remediation. They explore why upgrading legacy systems is so hard, Schneider’s journey from Netflix to building large-scale code transformation tools like OpenRewrite, and how major companies like Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft use it.

They also discuss AI in software development, cutting through the hype to show where it genuinely helps, and the human and technical challenges of modernization. The conversation offers a practical look at how AI and automation can boost productivity without replacing the need for expert oversight.

Show Highlights

(2:07) Book Writing and the Pain of Documentation

(4:03) Why Software Modernization Is So Hard

(6:53) Automating Software Modernization at Netflix

(8:07) Culture and Modernization: Netflix vs. Google vs. JP Morgan

(10:40) Social Engineering Problems in Software Modernization

(13:20) The Geometric Explosion of Software Complexity

(17:57) The Foundation for LLMs in Software Modernization

(21:16) AI Coding Assistants: Confidence, Fallibility, and Collaboration

(22:37) The Python 2 to 3 Migration: Lessons for Modernization

(27:56) The Human Element: Responsibility, Skepticism, and the Future of Work

Links

1. Crying Out Cloud Podcast & Newsletter: https://www.wiz.io/crying-out-cloud
2. Modern (Jonathan Schneider's company): https://modern.ai
3. LinkedIn (Jonathan Schneider): https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathanschneider/