Related:

https://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 like burning money, and hardware, on fire."

"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

"physical" datacenter ?

whats the alternative? a datacenter that exists only in my imagination?

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.

Have they never heard of remote hands? The cloud will be much more expensive than than what you would pay for someone to replace a hard drive for you.

The cloud is just someone else's datacenter.

Blog post from 2016, detailing the setup: https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-ar...

It's a bit of a shame, but I guess also with declining traffic and revenue, they're also downsizing.

"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?