Also I can't help wondering if the switch to cloud makes sense for stack overflow now again because their traffic collapsed. I took the whole post as something that should be mourned a bit, not gleefully destroyed.
Lets use some logic here. The disposal company is taking the cables with them to recycle them for the copper wire. Same with power cables.
Anyone who has posted "free" things online knows it comes a cost, thats the logic part I was referring too. When you work through the scenarios the "logical" conclusion is to give them to the recycler that you already have out at the datacenter for the systems you are decommissioning.
(Put them in a box that says "free" in the lobby of the NY office then throw what hasn't been taken a month later)
Stack Overflow used to serve over half a billion page views per month on only 25 servers[0]. I wonder how much traffic they get now, excluding crawlers?
Anecdotally, one of the reasons for SO's decline is that an LLM gives you the SO answer without the condescending snark. SO could have fixed that years ago, but didn't. So perhaps it might turn out to be yet another example of the dictum that culture eats strategy for breakfast.
[0] https://highscalability.com/stackoverflow-update-560m-pagevi...
The hard drives are most likely being shredded since that is a common practice and certification feature offered by most disposal companies.
The servers are being "destroyed" because thats how they will be accounted for in inventory and tax purposes to account for full depreciation. The company isn't "selling" the servers to the disposal company so they are marked as "destroyed."
Unless specified in the contract the disposal company will sell the chassis without the drives to a reseller or if they are being paid to dispose of the system, they will separate the components and recycle the metal.
The same goes for the power and network cables, they will go off to a recycler, its how disposal companies off-set their pricing.
What happens with the shredded material? Is it recycled? Sent to heavy industries?
Happy to say that my company shreds its old hard drives, then puts new ones in the old laptops and desktops and spruces them up for reuse.
We team up with a local organization to give them to poor children and families each Christmas. IT always sends around a bunch of photos afterward of kids who don't always know where they'll sleep from night to night clinging to a used computer like it's a life ring and they're in the middle of the ocean. I've been told that for some of them, it's the only present they'll receive the entire year.
We don't qualify for a tax break or any other renumeration for this. We do it because it's a nice thing to do.
(I have no idea what happens to servers. Not my department.)
The whole situation so ridiculous and bureaucratic
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?
On-prem still may be preferable to cloud for some use cases.
Plus, there was the whole closure of AWS EC2 Classic, replaced with AWS VPC.
This another reason why deploying over multiple AZs has its benefit. Not just for technical failure, but it means you can still move should one region close down.
I suppose an interesting questions is: would I prefer to move a single-AZ deployment such as this in the cloud, or in the real world? And honestly I can see the pros and cons of each.
In the cloud it involves a bunch of engineering time (possibly minimal, likely a lot more given reality). In the real-world it involves a temporary fibre connection to the next DC over, and a gradual or rapid move of hardware with the help of some specialist contractors (for example). But at least the state and implementation quirks move with the compute. I can see it either way, but I can feel myself wanting to believe in the latter. There is something about trucking servers across town that appeals me.
I could go months without touching the thing running the application.
Or lighting could blow the UPS.
Or the mainboard could flake out.
Or the RAID could drop a disk.
Or you could get hit by a bus.
Again, there is never any free, at best it is cost deferred.
... 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
coderintherye•6mo ago
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...
jauntywundrkind•6mo ago