Sad times StackOverflow takes down all its physical servers | Hacker News Reader

Sad times StackOverflow takes down all its physical servers

stackoverflow.blog

62 pointsslroger11 comments

Very sad that StackOverflow which was one of the best examples of self hosted infrastructure is now unracking and decommissioning all of its hardware.

With the sadder realisation from the article that more independent co-lo facilities are getting shutdown leaving many largescale deployments withno recourse but to go to the cloud for hyperscale. As a business at least in the US , im not seeing any greeenfield facilities being spun up to compete with the big5(Oracle/Google/Azure/Amazon/IBM) clouds.

A number of cloud migrations I've worked on are due to these reasons. If you're the second largest customer at a colo, and the largest is pulling all of their equipment out, chances are the colo won't be around much longer and you need to start getting proactive. Some of the companies are on very tight migration timelines because the colo announced they are closing down and were caught flat footed.

> 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.

Wow! That’d sure be some waste of disk drives and memory. Do they destroy it themselves or some contractor does this?

I don't like it. Giving away or selling the components for free would have been better than just throwing it at the dump. I appreciate the PII concerns, but these days disks have built-in sanitation procedures, as part of an industry-wide program to reduce waste.

And if you throw away memory for PII concerns, that would be beyond crazy.

> We’ve since moved all our sites to the cloud. Our servers are now cattle, not pets

Because if you host your own servers and infra they are automatically pets? Seems like a weird statement. I think that phrase was even coined before cloud became really big.

Many cattle have names and given that it takes a bunch of cloud instances to do what a small menagerie of self-hosted servers can do, I'd say a better analogy is an infestation of rats.

So now Stackoverflow will also go down if the cloud is down: https://www.thousandeyes.com/blog/aws-outage-analysis-octobe...

How are all the cloud engineers going to solve their issues if Stackoverflow is down?

I first laughed, then I realized that some of those indeed will bump into an extra surprise. Luckily, all the chatbots have a copy of SO.

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44612736

Sad?

Great news for me! LOL.

Trashy site cannot disappear any sooner.

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