[organic_popcorn]

> The experience hasn't been great. It may simply be sour 'grapes' because, after all the expertise a whole generation has built up learning UNIX, and all the internet protocols (DNS, ARP, Email, reading RFCs, networking, routing) we get told that all that old stuff is just 'legacy,' and that we should retool around amazon's proprietary services instead.

Losing skills you worked on for years is just part of this space. We are continually building on new abstractions so that we can focus on building solutions.

This really feels like a rant of kids these days. SCRUM doesn’t mean you can’t do upfront design.

[snovv_crash]

The entirety of StackOverflow runs on something like 4 machines. Abstraction layers are expensive, and having to learn scaling methodologies unnecessarily when a better choice of upfront technology would render it unnecessary is very un-agile.

[oxfordmale]

StackOverlow doesn't run on just 4 machines. Even in 2016 it required significant hardware:

4 Microsoft SQL Servers (new hardware for 2 of them) 11 IIS Web Servers (new hardware) 2 Redis Servers (new hardware) 3 Tag Engine servers (new hardware for 2 of the 3) 3 Elasticsearch servers (same) 4 HAProxy Load Balancers (added 2 to support CloudFlare) 2 Networks (each a Nexus 5596 Core + 2232TM Fabric Extenders, upgraded to 10Gbps everywhere) 2 Fortinet 800C Firewalls (replaced Cisco 5525-X ASAs) 2 Cisco ASR-1001 Routers (replaced Cisco 3945 Routers) 2 Cisco ASR-1001-x Routers (new!)S