Well, it's an interactive database backed web site. That describes like maybe 90% of the things running on AWS. StackOverflow is useful because it reminds peop

Well, it's an interactive database backed web site. That describes like maybe 90% of the things running on AWS. StackOverflow is useful because it reminds people that machines are fast, and you probably don't need that many of them to scale to large sizes. StackOverflow is used by the entire global population of developers more or less and it runs off of one large MS SQL Server + some web servers. No auto scaling (not enough hw expense to be worth it), no need for fancy cloud LBs etc. Sure maybe your service is gonna scale to more than the world's population of developers. Great. But ... a lot of services won't even go that far. For them it's hard to conclude it's really needed. To pull off a StackOverflow you do need skilled sysadmins though. As the article points out, a surprisingly large number of people who call themselves devops don't really know UNIX sysadmin anymore. https://stackexchange.com/performance https://stackexchange.com/performance