— written by a human!
Recently at work, I worked on a major project - Multitenancy.
Initially, we used to provide one virtual machine to every customer that we aquired. This meant a lot of manual configuration, multiple deployments for a small hot-fix, and more importantly, a lot of time spent in connecting to a remote SSH session and debugging network issues. Multitenancy would fix this by basically alloting all customers to a single machine. This didn’t sound bad, but now think about the legacy code - all the MongoDB connections, for example, or my .env files - everything was customized to an individual instance, and I had to make it so that the application for each customer worked within the scope of their own organization. In short, I did not want data from one organization to be visible in another.
The code itself was difficult to conceptualize, but not impossible. What I felt was harder were the migrations themselves. My team and I spent countless hours pouring over connection errors, debugging Docker containerization issues, pointing our code to the correct env files - we almost gave up on this massive undertaking multiple times!
Once we pulled through and this project was done, I began to wonder - what if there was some way to make this process easier?
