If you haven’t heard, we raised a little money recently.
For those unfamiliar, depreciated hardware effectively means “off the books.” We could re-purpose it outside production, donate it, let employees go nuts, etc. Most companies depreciate hardware across 3 years, making questions like “what do we do with the old servers?” much easier. Seriously, that’s it: do what works for you. We were running on 4 year old hardware at the time and it worked out pretty well so far. We can order all hardware up front with the simple goal of 4 years of life and with a 4 year warranty.
This lets us simplify a great many things from a management perspective, for example: we limit ourselves to 2 generations of servers at any given time and we aren’t in the warranty renewal business except for exceptions. After that we will: retire it, replace it, or make an exception and extend the warranty on it. We decided that from here on out: hardware is good for approximately 4 years. One of those decisions was what to do about infrastructure hardware from a lifecycle and financial standpoint. All of the Stack Exchange engineering staff got together at our Denver office in October last year and we made some decisions. We mostly do this for page load performance the lower CPU and memory usage on the web tier is usually a (welcomed) side-effect. We’re always reorganizing, tuning, checking allocations, and generally optimizing code and infrastructure wherever we can. There just hasn’t been a need since we first moved to the New York data center (Oct 23rd, 2010 – over 4 years ago). Up until 2 months ago, we hadn’t replaced any servers since upgrading from the original Stack Overflow web stack.
First, take a moment to look at what Stack Overflow started as. It’s 5 years later and hardware has come a long way. So here’s how and why we upgrade a data center. We love being open with everything we do (including infrastructure), and really consider it one of the best job perks we have. A few weeks ago we upgraded a lot of the core infrastructure in our New York (okay, it’s really in New Jersey now – but don’t tell anyone) data center.
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