Thomas Athanas on Building Without Vendor Lock-In

Thomas Athanas on Building Without Vendor Lock-In

From Elixir Mentor by Jacob Luetzow

March 7, 2026 · 1h 38m · Season 1 · Episode 75

About this episode

Thomas Athanas discusses the challenges and decisions in building systems 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…

People in this episode

Host: Jacob Luetzow

Guest: Thomas Athanas

Topics covered

  • vendor lock-in
  • infrastructure decisions
  • leadership
  • AI in development
  • Postgres configuration
  • auth requirements

Keywords

  • vendor lock-in
  • infrastructure
  • AI development
  • Postgres
  • auth
  • Erlang
  • leadership

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: LevelAll, Fly, Gigalixir, Phoenix LiveView, Ash framework, Ash APS, Auth0, FusionAuth, OIDC, SAML

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