"For security reasons (and to protect the PII of all our users and customers), everything was being shredded and/or destroyed" - what!? That is ridiculous. The only possible thing you need to destroy would be the hard drives. Why on earth would you shred everything?
The reasoning could be that this makes reliably scaling down (and thus keep making a profit) easier, starting with getting rid of SREs.
We have similar movement going on with Xing here in Hamburg, Germany (once conceived as a LinkedIn competitor).
Great names that still have a lot of momentum, but are expected by ownership to slow down.
Reminds me of Scott Galloway’s most profitable investment having been a yellow pages company. Yes, the market shrunk, but they could shrink running costs as fast or even faster.
Any company that switches from real hardware to "the cloud" is going to triple their compute costs. They're obviously making too much money. With them not even selling their old hardware, they are doing the equivalent of setting large piles of money on fire
It could just be that they think the increase in their cloud bill will be low enough to justify switching and stopping employing people who currently run things in their datacentre.
And yet people don't really consider the cost of employing people to manage the cloud infrastructure... In most companies I know of that are all in on cloud that's a larger team than what manages physical infrastructure in the companies that still have that.
This is a terrible waste. Wiping all storage would take a day at best; this hardware is still worth $10-50k. They could donate it.
Then again, they’re migrating to Azure and the whole thing ran for years on SQL Server; being good at tech was never these ex-MS guys’ strong suit. This kind of forklifting is expected from this specific type of corporate droid, it’s how they’ve always done it. Entire industries run just like this, and it’s terrible and stupid.
Nobody likes to hear it but hardware just doesn’t last that long.
Even if you reuse the hardware by selling it off to homelab types or donating it, it’ll get faulty in a few very short years. It’s already been running 24/7 for a long time.
It’ll also be far less energy efficient in operation compared to newer hardware generations.
I also don’t really see what your beef with SO is for using SQL Server. Are you suggesting that companies do a major refactor every time their software stack goes out of style? There really isn’t anything wrong with SQL Server nor is there anything wrong with SO at a technical level.
You might be upset that entire industries run on imperfect tech stacks but value isn’t driven by tech stack choice. I’m not going to buy a sandwich from a different restaurant because they are using better tech than the restaurant with bad food.
> Nobody likes to hear it but hardware just doesn’t last that long.
My experience completely contradicts this, both at work and otherwise. The typical longevity of servers has always astounded me. Though my current biggish server (not including routers, etc) is a Zen 1 on 14nm built pre-pandemic; I've read 12nm and smaller might be more susceptible to degradation. RAM feature size has remained fairly constant, but I wouldn't be surprised if SSD MLC longevity has degraded.
The real issue, IMO, is that when you have a small set of servers any hardware issues become a bigger hassle. It's precisely because you can go years with a rack of servers humming along that when there is an issue, it feels quite intrusive and annoying.
>Nobody likes to hear it but hardware just doesn’t last that long.
Authorized corporate resellers beg to differ.
>It’ll also be far less energy efficient in operation compared to newer hardware generations.
I'd love spending thousands of dollars for new server racks for my homelab just because every other company decided to destroy their server racks instead of reselling them when they eventually upgrade their datacenter.
>》food analogy《
Imagine being so fat you look at computers and see food.
"Stack Overflow no longer has any physical datacenters or offices; we are fully in the cloud and remote!"
Am I misunderstanding something here? They're just transferring from a physical datacenter owned and managed directly by them, to a small rented/leased part of those owned and managed by someone bigger. Since digital data can't just exist in a magical, airy fairy realm, it has to physically be somewhere either way.
Wouldn't it have been safer to control their own physical servers, considering how they mention protecting user information?
It means that Stack Overflow as a company doesn't need to think about the exact location, except in so far as they need the actual operator to satisfactorily assert that it's secure and operating in the right jurisdiction with enough backup redundancies.
As a Private Equity holding, it's safer to outsource regulatory/compliance/security risk and liability to a reputable third party, where reputable is the proverbial "nobody gets fired for buying IBM" of the cloud era.
"our datacenter vendor in NJ decided to shut down that location, and we needed to be out by July 2025."
Ah, so you're saying that going "on-prem" does not in fact give you total control over the situation? How peculiar! Has AWS ever shut down an EC2 region and forced everyone out?
Hasn't stack overflow been in steady decline for years? How can they justify the huge increase in hardware cost that going to a cloud provider brings? I suppose it makes it easier to rapidly scale down your footprint to meet lower demand.
...man I wonder whether you have those for sale, I'd love to purchase a piece of histo-
>"For security reasons (and to protect the PII of all our users and customers), everything was being shredded and/or destroyed. Nothing was being kept."
... are you retarded?
>"As Ellora Praharaj, our Director of Reliability Engineering, said, “No need to be gentle anymore.”
27 comments
[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 55.2 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3248911 - Why Stack Exchange Isn’t in the Cloud (2011)
The original blog post is down but available here: http://web.archive.org/web/20120120201529/http://blog.server...
We have similar movement going on with Xing here in Hamburg, Germany (once conceived as a LinkedIn competitor).
Great names that still have a lot of momentum, but are expected by ownership to slow down.
Reminds me of Scott Galloway’s most profitable investment having been a yellow pages company. Yes, the market shrunk, but they could shrink running costs as fast or even faster.
whats the alternative? a datacenter that exists only in my imagination?
Then again, they’re migrating to Azure and the whole thing ran for years on SQL Server; being good at tech was never these ex-MS guys’ strong suit. This kind of forklifting is expected from this specific type of corporate droid, it’s how they’ve always done it. Entire industries run just like this, and it’s terrible and stupid.
Even if you reuse the hardware by selling it off to homelab types or donating it, it’ll get faulty in a few very short years. It’s already been running 24/7 for a long time.
It’ll also be far less energy efficient in operation compared to newer hardware generations.
I also don’t really see what your beef with SO is for using SQL Server. Are you suggesting that companies do a major refactor every time their software stack goes out of style? There really isn’t anything wrong with SQL Server nor is there anything wrong with SO at a technical level.
You might be upset that entire industries run on imperfect tech stacks but value isn’t driven by tech stack choice. I’m not going to buy a sandwich from a different restaurant because they are using better tech than the restaurant with bad food.
My experience completely contradicts this, both at work and otherwise. The typical longevity of servers has always astounded me. Though my current biggish server (not including routers, etc) is a Zen 1 on 14nm built pre-pandemic; I've read 12nm and smaller might be more susceptible to degradation. RAM feature size has remained fairly constant, but I wouldn't be surprised if SSD MLC longevity has degraded.
The real issue, IMO, is that when you have a small set of servers any hardware issues become a bigger hassle. It's precisely because you can go years with a rack of servers humming along that when there is an issue, it feels quite intrusive and annoying.
$50k is $50k.
Authorized corporate resellers beg to differ.
>It’ll also be far less energy efficient in operation compared to newer hardware generations.
I'd love spending thousands of dollars for new server racks for my homelab just because every other company decided to destroy their server racks instead of reselling them when they eventually upgrade their datacenter.
>》food analogy《
Imagine being so fat you look at computers and see food.
It's a bit of a shame, but I guess also with declining traffic and revenue, they're also downsizing.
Am I misunderstanding something here? They're just transferring from a physical datacenter owned and managed directly by them, to a small rented/leased part of those owned and managed by someone bigger. Since digital data can't just exist in a magical, airy fairy realm, it has to physically be somewhere either way.
Wouldn't it have been safer to control their own physical servers, considering how they mention protecting user information?
Ah, so you're saying that going "on-prem" does not in fact give you total control over the situation? How peculiar! Has AWS ever shut down an EC2 region and forced everyone out?
... are you retarded?
>"As Ellora Praharaj, our Director of Reliability Engineering, said, “No need to be gentle anymore.”
Of course it's an Indian Director