Thomas Athanas on Building Without Vendor Lock-In

Thomas Athanas, Head of Engineering at LevelAll, joins me on the Elixir Mentor Podcast to talk through the infrastructure, architectural, and leadership decisions that come with building systems you actually own — and what happens when vendor lock-in catches up with you in production.

Thomas walks through LevelAll's move away from Fly and Gigalixir toward bare metal hardware, the thundering herd problem that comes with serving 50,000 concurrent education users, and why they made the call to remove both Phoenix LiveView and Ash framework from production. We get into Ash APS premium support, JSONB query challenges, and the tradeoffs of leaning on a framework when hiring for it is hard.

We talk about using AI as a development planning tool and context keeper for managers — including Thomas's "Lore Master" concept, where AI agents preserve institutional knowledge so it never walks out the door. From there we get into the Auth0 rate limiting incident that hit during a live onboarding, the FusionAuth migration that followed, enterprise auth requirements like OIDC and SAML, and the bcrypt hash conversion work that made it all possible. Thomas also shares his work on a custom Erlang-based bare metal deployment agent and his approach to Postgres configuration and backups with pgBackRest.

The second half covers founder mode mentality, total ownership of problems, the player-coach leadership style, Sanity CMS vendor lock-in, building an audience vs. building a customer base, and practical advice for technical founders who keep procrastinating with features instead of making sales.

Connect with Thomas:
- X/Twitter: https://x.com/ThomasAthanas
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomasathanas/

Sponsors:
- BEAMOps: https://beamops.co.uk
- Paraxial.io: https://paraxial.io
- Jido: https://agentjido.xyz/discord

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