Stack Overflow removed all their servers and migrated to the cloud. Also, they mentioned that they have no offices. That I can understand. Removing their servers, no I cannot.
What’s the logic behind this? I cannot wrap my head around this.
- What about the need to physically drive to there to do something with the server? Cannot they hire someone to do the job? It’s just ridiculous.
- Why destroy the hardware? What a waste! Weren’t your disks encrypted? If they were, you rewrite everything a couple of times, and it’s impossible to recover. Destroying everything else just cries incompetence to me. The fuck were you having on your servers? No, really. What users data? The database of questions and comments? Aren’t they public already? Hashed passwords? What?
This feels like they’re cursed there, and their administration brain rot has filled everyone. They migrated to someone else’s data centre. Because what? Today’s price is cheaper, isn’t it? All that is just somewhat weird to me. Drop the five nines uptime requirement. Optimise the software stack to be more efficient and run on less servers, so you could manage spikes more efficiently. Sell half of your servers, if you predict you won’t ever need it.
I simply don’t understand that as of now. I may lack quite a bit of knowledge, that’s for sure. But I see that as some cultural thing, plus the red eyed crowd to somewhat forgetting we’re the minority. People in general won’t care if, say, stack overflow would go offline for a week. Will it though? Of course it won’t. So even going offline for a while for whatever reason is not the end of the world.
It feels like these too big to fail companies are simply unable to scale down when needed.
I won’t ever believe being in the ‘cloud’ is sane strategy for a company that can manage their servers by themselves.