Pete Emerson, our Director of Tech Operations, spoke at Surge Conference 2012.  He discussed our scale engineering challenges and solutions to a crowd of 400 technologists and engineers.

Pete’s presentation walks through the costs and benefits of using load balancers versus building a custom solution, including scalability, flexibility and trading off development time vs.  packaging, predictability and the capital expense of out-of-the-box solution.  He then dives into how we rid ourselves of load balancers and built our own custom solution using Keepalived and GSLB, which we continue to use to this day.