> How can a website be this tightly coupled with the operating system it's running on? The post is about their database servers, not the site. Microsoft SQL Se

> How can a website be this tightly coupled with the operating system it's running on? The post is about their database servers, not the site. Microsoft SQL Server’s high availability and disaster recovery solutions are built atop Windows Server Failover Clustering, which comes with a lot of gotchas. For example, for over a decade, all of the members of a cluster had to be the same major version of Windows. That made upgrades not just difficult, but impossible: you had to build a brand new cluster from scratch every time and then migrate over to it, and destroy the old cluster when you were done. Microsoft does indeed go to lengths to assure backwards compatibility. This isn’t a compatibility issue - it’s an upgrade process issue. (Source: I did SQL Server HA/DR work for years, including helping Stack out along the way, but abandoned HA/DR work when it became kinda untenable. Now I focus on the performance tuning side instead.)