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I think that is the thesis of StackOverflow's devs. You can vertically scale easier and much further than what most people think.

No groud up re-architecture, no microservice complexity, no crazy high cloud bills for exotic high power VMs. Just upfront capx for your own big iron and the skill to run it.

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Amazon is offering 24TB RAM high memory machines on AWS. The Stackoverflow setup is far away from Big Iron :)

In terms of opportunities to add complexity: I'm surprised there is no mention of a data-platform or any model training for ranking, etc.

To reduce components, it might be possible to combine ElasticSearch and MSSQL into just PostgreSQL which has awesome text indices. As MSSQL performs very well and presents a somewhat esoteric SQL dialect this could be an expensive project.

The specs seem to line up with their upgrade notes from 2015 so it was a bit more "big iron" when made. Not that it's exactly under stress at the moment by any means but that's just further proof big iron can get you really far.

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