| 23 is not a lot of servers. That is still doable with mid-90s era hand management of servers (all named after characters in lord of the rings). Not that you should, but you could. And the growth rate must be very low and pretty easy to plan out your O/S upgrade and hardware upgrade tempo. And it was actually possible to manage tens of thousands of servers before containers. The only thing you really need is what they now call a "cattle not pets" mentality. What you lose is the flexibility of shoving around software programmatically to other bits of hardware to scale/failover and you'll need to overprovision some, but even if half of SOs infrastructure is "wasted" that isn't a lot of money. And if they're running that hardware lean in racks in a datacenter that they lease and they're not writing large checks to VMware/EMC/NetApp for anything, then they'd probably spend 10x the money microservicing everything and shoving it all into someone's kubernetes cloud. In most places though this will fail due to resume-driven design and you'll wind up with a lot of sprawl because managers don't say no to overengineering. So at SO there must be at least one person in management with a cheap vision of how to engineer software and hardware. Once they leave or that culture changes the footprint will eventually start to explode. |