Scaling Tech Companies

Scaling Tech Companies // TECH 678

Isaac Levy, Senior Systems Administrator, Buywithme.com

Monday, August 15th from 8:00 pm to 9:30 pm.

Before anyone called it "the cloud," many forms of managed hosting and internet services boot-strapped and drove businesses of all sizes and shapes. However, with a shift to open source technologies, and a larger and more mature technical workforce, how do we draw the line to bring services in-house, and take responsibility for our business-critical infrastructure? By what metric can we judge which elements to keep or push to managed services, or even some form of "the cloud"?

This class covers case studies from three technology-driven business during periods of rapid growth, examining 10+ years of activity. The aim is to share successes, and explore some recovered catastrophes for both 'managed' and 'in-house' technology infrastructure, including networks, servers, services and applications.

Isaac Levy has worked on all sides of managed services. In the early 2000's, Levy was a Managing Partner at iMeme web hosting, a virtual-server ISP and an incipient forerunner of Amazon Web Services based on FreeBSD jail systems, providing infrastructure for many emerging companies. Levy since held senior systems administrator/security roles in online direct-to-print, online retail, luxury travel, offline data warehousing and processing and privacy/anonymity security business. Levy currently serves as senior systems administrator and systems engineering lead for Buywithme.com, a Social Coupon Daily Deal, managing the internet-facing core application and infrastructure.

GA would like to thank NYI (www.nyi.net) for helping to organize this session.

Use the hashtag #gabusinessinfrastructure to ask follow-up questions and continue the conversation.

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