I'm surprised by all the negative comments here surrounding how Windows Server or SQL Server makes this more complicated, or whether the license costs are prohi

I'm surprised by all the negative comments here surrounding how Windows Server or SQL Server makes this more complicated, or whether the license costs are prohibitive. I worked as a .NET dev for nine years, and although I've never had to deal with upgrades at this level before, I can appreciate that at the kind of scale that Stack Overflow operate, and considering they run on physical boxes (a rarity in any stack nowadays) any kind of upgrade between major database and OS versions is going to result in its own issues. While I don't work on the Microsoft stack any more, I've always appreciated the way that Stack Overflow build their software. Their engineers and DBA's seem to be a who's who of talent, and they both build great services and put out great content, at scale. It's doubly-surprising when so many people used to give Jeff Atwood so much shit for not delivering anything of note when Coding Horror was one of the top programming blogs on the web. The stack might be very different to anything done in 2019, but the fact that I can't think of many times where Stack Overflow went down shows that they're doing a great job, and hopefully they'll continue to document the journey for years to come.