[Styck]

Many of us have .NET experience, really like C# but have sensible reasons for not recommending it. A Microsoft only stack is nowhere near as flexible as Linux and if you were to reach Stack Overflow's levels of traffic you'll not be able to avoid the need to run a part of your infrastructure on Linux. I seriously doubt Stack Overflow is running Redis, ElasticSearch & HAProxy* on Windows. Unless you already have a team proficient in .NET, there are few good reasons to use it instead of a JVM language.

*https://github.com/opserver/Opserver/tree/master/Opserver.Co...

[Nick-Craver]

Indeed we run all of these things (and more) on linux. We use the most appropriate architecture we can come up with at the time. When a better overall option appears, we do that. New information and technology makes our decisions change, that's how brains are supposed to work, I think.

We use linux for: redis, elasticsearch, HAProxy, DNS (bind), nginx, mail (exim) apache, wordpress, mysql, nexpose, backups, puppet, asterix, android builds and our internal mercurial.

As Opserver grows we will be monitoring Windows and Linux with our solution, but simple to setup via polling, or more advanced monitoring via an agent (puppet and DSC configurable/installable). We plan to have agents for both Windows and Linux open sourced, both using a standard communication format so that anyone can write additional agents, or add to them, or...whatever really. We haven't started building this yet, a complete monitoring solution is what we'll be working on over the next 6-12 months. It will be in the open as we go, with lots of internal dogfooding to prove things out.

[EnderMB]

I imagine that 99% of the users on here won't work on any projects that receive the same levels of traffic that Stack Overflow will get, and as such the worries of scaling to this level aren't really an issue.

For the vast majority of websites that developers will build, the .NET stack is absolutely fine. My only gripe with being a .NET developer is that if your professional experience is limited to a Windows based stack you may find it hard to move over to a Unix-based stack.

[JonoW]

Just because you use c# doesn't mean your whole stack needs to be Microsoft. No reason why you could have Windows web-servers running asp.net/c#, but have postgres DB, nginx, memcache etc on linux. Azure seems to be actually encouraging this.

The cost of windows licenses for web-servers is not that much. Avoiding SQL Server is the big win in reducing cost.

[Styck]

All true but there is still quite a bit of inefficiency involved if you need a team that is both proficient in deploying & running Linux infrastructure tools as well as Windows servers.

And given that this discussion is taking place in the comments section of a link to a custom-made monitoring dashboard that quite possibly wouldn't be needed* if SO was a Linux-only shop doesn't exactly devalue my previous statement.

*I have no idea whether this could be replaced with Nagios or Munin

[garethadams]

I imagine the Stackoverflow guys are familiar with Linux architectures, they also run the open source forum Discourse[1] which is a Ruby on Rails app that comes with a recommendation to set up and develop in a *NIX environment[2].

Certainly the point is to use the right tool for the job, and I wouldn't dismiss your final comment: having a team proficient in .NET is a great reason to build your tools with/for that platform.

But no, I don't think it would be fair to reply to this article saying "Why didn't they build this for [my preferred language]?"

[1]: http://www.discourse.org/ [2]: http://blog.discourse.org/2013/04/discourse-as-your-first-ra...