[zo1]

The details of their architecture is documented in a series of blog posts:

https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/03/stack-overflow-a-tech...

I get what you're saying, they didn't do dynamic and "wild" horizontal scaling, they focused more on having an optimal architecture with beefy "vertically scaled" servers.

Very much something we should focus on. These days horizontal scaling, microservices, kubernetes, and just generally "throwing compute" at the problem is the lazy answer to scaling issues.