🔗 34 days in an Elixir tunnel to refactor my SaaS without a rewrite

Alzo, an Elixir SaaS for architecture firms, faced growth challenges due to its original architecture. Lucas Sifoni spent 34 days refactoring Alzo into a clustered multi-tenant application without a complete rewrite. He removed bottlenecks in the architecture, including eliminating the message broker, and adopted a new model where each tenant receives its own PostgreSQL schema

This approach allowed for easier migrations and tenant management, although it introduced complexity in handling shared data. Sifoni utilized explicit scope passing for tenant data management and enlisted the aid of LLMs to handle numerous compilation errors. He updated the hot-code loading process to accommodate clustering and ensured the system remained efficient during upgrades.

The effort proved worthwhile, enabling the company to grow without losing its iterative development advantages.