You have to understand that what StackOverflow gets away with in terms of hardware is not at all reflective of what other shops will be able to do. SO can work

You have to understand that what StackOverflow gets away with in terms of hardware is not at all reflective of what other shops will be able to do. SO can work on such a small amount of hardware because they've got people who either know the entire infrastructure from ground up, or have the skillset and interest to figure it out. Plus they have very tight coordination between the folks doing the development, and running it day to day (possibly because it's the same people). Your average developer working on a government contract through $BIGNAMESERVICESPROVIDER is almost certainly not going to have that skillset or motivation to learn it. Even in the unlikely scenario that they did, they're not going to be in a situation where they can act on it. It'll be a case of developing to specification, throwing stuff over a wall to some sort of QA, and then throwing the result of that over to someone to run it. The whole thing will be run by project managers who have opex budgets to meet, on infrastructure that was specified well before the thing was ever built.