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Title: Stack Exchange Moves Everything to the Cloud, Destroys Servers in New
Jersey

Link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/07/26/...

Since 2010 Stack Exchange has run all its sites on physical hardware in New
Jersey - about 50 different servers. (When Ryan Donovan joined in 2019, "I
saw the original server mounted on a wall with a laudatory plaque like a
beloved pet." But this month everything moved to the cloud, a new blog post
explains. "Our servers are now cattle, not pets. Nobody is going to have to
drive to our New Jersey data center and replace or reboot hardware..." Over
the years, we've shared glamor shots of our server racks and info about
updating them. For almost our entire 16-year existence, the SRE team has
managed all datacenter operations, including the physical servers, cabling,
racking, replacing failed disks and everything else in between. This work
required someone to physically show up at the datacenter and poke the
machines... [O]n July 2nd, in anticipation of the datacenter's closure, we
unracked all the servers, unplugged all the cables, and gave these once
mighty machines their final curtain call... We moved Stack Overflow for Teams
to Azure in 2023 and proved we could do it. Now we just had to tackle the
public sites (Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange network), which is hosted
on Google Cloud. Early last year, our datacenter vendor in New Jersey decided
to shut down that location, and we needed to be out by July 2025. Our other
datacenter - in Colorado - was decommissioned in June. It was primarily for
disaster recovery, which we didn't need any more. Stack Overflow no longer
has any physical datacenters or offices; we are fully in the cloud and
remote...! [O]ur Staff Site Reliability Engineer, got a little wistful. "I
installed the new web tier servers a few years ago as part of planned
upgrades," he said. "It's bittersweet that I'm the one deracking them also."
It's the IT version of Old Yeller. There's photos of the 50 servers, as well
as the 400+ cables connecting them, all of which wound up in a junk pile.
"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... Ever have difficulty disconnecting an RJ45 cable? Well, here was our
opportunity to just cut the damn things off instead of figuring out why the
little tab wouldn't release the plug."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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