Case Study: Switching from Linux to FreeBSD
Channel: Andrea Ross
Date: 04/06/2013

How technology supported advocacy in ExperiencePoint's conversion


This talk will outline the strategy used to migrate a small Canadian software company's Linux-based server infrastructure to FreeBSD. Part advocacy-strategy and part best-practices, the hope is that you'll come away with some extra tools to promote implementation of FreeBSD in your workplace.

ExperiencePoint is a small (20 person) Canadian company that creates training simulations as web applications. The business is wholly dependent on its web server infrastructure for delivering its product.

In 2011, I started working for ExperiencePoint and began the process of replacing its aging collection of Linux servers with a more robust FreeBSD server infrastructure. The Linux servers in question had been set up in a hurry, and the skilled software engineers who had set them up were not professional systems administrators. Linux was selected as the server operating system, but there were great opportunities for improvement and change. This talk is the story of that change.

In addition to addressing the management concerns of replacing a "known" (Linux) with an "unknown" (FreeBSD), we'll explore the kinds of opportunities you should recognize in Linux environments you may come across. If you can improve reliability, reduce risk and improve performance, that's even better job security than switching to an operating system that nobody else knows.