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Comment by szszrk | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. That twitter thread is just pure rage based on no data. Sum up resources from that page - we are talking around 6500GB* of RAM worth of servers. That is no homelab.

* Maybe a bit more/less, because it's not clear to me if DB RAM is per server, or per cluster. Likely server, as on other servers. There is also no data on how big is their haproxy.

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And yet the main point stand : they don't need K8s to manage this application running on 23 servers.

And yet it wouldn't be out of place either.

No one needs k8s. Bringing up their infrastructure in a k8s troubleshooting how-to was a weird thing to do in the first place. It's comparing apples and chandelier - makes no sense.

They have a typical vertically scaled infrastructure, most services have just two nodes, one active. The biggest ones are databases which in many companies are handled in "the classic way" anyway. Clearly it's not designed as microservices and doesn't need dynamic automation at all. Why on earth would they even bring k8s up in their plans?

Nevertheless, it is true that Stack Overflow has focused on backend performance and scaled vertically a long way, further than is fashionable. Just not so far as only using two servers for everything.

Because they're constrained by Windows and Microsoft licensing, scaling out was never an easy option for them.

>Because they're constrained by Windows

How? didn't they migrate to .NET Core?

Did they ? I must have missed it, but seems so :

https://www.infoq.com/news/2020/04/Stack-Overflow-New-Archit...

That doesn't mean they've moved away from Windows servers hosting it though.

What constraints? Windows Server licenses are bought per-core and the company can easily afford plenty more. This is a non-issue.

But adding a new server includes having to buy new licenses, which is a consideration you don't have with OSes that under licensing. It costs extra money, and used to be per socket when their infrastructure was conceived.

So what? Licenses are not expensive, especially compared to all of their other costs like the dozens of staff, and paying an invoice isn't complicated. They maintain their own hardware in colocation facilities so they'll get a new license way before they even get the hardware shipped out.

Why does this make scaling out "never an easy option for them"?

I'm curious. I saw a similar comment earlier, surely the surely windows licensing is just a drop in the bucket compared to the rest of the infrastructure costs?

I've not really looked at hosting anything on windows before, do they have unusual licensing terms in such a way that it would be a significant cost?

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