Meetings and Events

Scaling Startup Infrastructure: A Datacenter Move Story, Ike Levy

2014-11-05 @ 17:45 EST (22:45 UTC) - @ 160 Varick St +

Focused on Open Source and "The BSD Mentality" approaches, this is an overview of a massive datacenter move project and systems rationalization. Startups grow organically, and as we all know, piles of organic material takes on a life of it's own; typically in the form of rot, fungus, parasites.

From the ground up, this presentation is about turning that swamp into bedrock at an accelerated pace.

With a focus on Open Source, and a de-emphasis on vendors or particular technologies, we'll cover key technical strategies for maintaining production systems and networks, while delivering what replaces it:

Key technologies to support High Availability systems
Cost Analysis, vendor relations, planning
Datacenters: what to look for, what to expect.
The cloud, your other datacenter.
Network design principles, (internet startup patterns).
Server design principles (and some tools).
Systems Automation principles, (and some tools).
Team coordination principles, when the challenges become total war.

Through each section, with an internet-facing business, security considerations will be considered at every step.

"Network Refactoring... or doing an oil change at 80 MPH." - Michael Lucas

"...and for Startups, the vehicle in question is a commercial airliner." - .ike

.ike has rationalized infrastructure for NYC startups since the dot-com bubble, and has spent more than 15 years obsessed with high-availability systems on the internet. Lucky to stand on the shoulders of UNIX giants, his background includes partnering to run an early Virtual Server ISP (before there was a cloud), as well as having a long history standing up internet-facing applications on UNIX systems and networks.

.ike has been a part of NYC*BUG since it was first launched in January 2004. He was a long-time member of the Lower East Side Mac Unix User Group, and is still in denial that this group no longer exists. His ACM membership has run out, but he'll get around to renewing it. He has spoken frequently on a number of UNIX and internet security topics at various venues, particularly on the issue of FreeBSD's jail(8), (a presentation now banned on several continents). .ike also likes POSIX shell programming, ssh, and digitizes rare books for fun.

Event Audio (recorded and processed by Nikolai Fetissov)