"For security reasons (and to protect the PII of all our users and customers), everything was being shredded and/or destroyed" - what!? That is ridiculous. The only possible thing you need to destroy would be the hard drives. Why on earth would you shred everything?
This is common compliance nomenclature. The only people paying the high cost to have a full sized piece of equipment destroyed are governments or R&D companies with unique prototypes.
The hard drives are most likely being shredded since that is a common practice and certification feature offered by most disposal companies.
The servers are being "destroyed" because thats how they will be accounted for in inventory and tax purposes to account for full depreciation. The company isn't "selling" the servers to the disposal company so they are marked as "destroyed."
Unless specified in the contract the disposal company will sell the chassis without the drives to a reseller or if they are being paid to dispose of the system, they will separate the components and recycle the metal.
The same goes for the power and network cables, they will go off to a recycler, its how disposal companies off-set their pricing.
Also thought that was quite wasteful. Even ethernet cables are cut. Why not just put them online for free pickup?
Also I can't help wondering if the switch to cloud makes sense for stack overflow now again because their traffic collapsed. I took the whole post as something that should be mourned a bit, not gleefully destroyed.
I would say they evaluated it would cost more for them to remove the HDD and sell the machine than just shred them. And they would not risk to forget a HDD inside
The reasoning could be that this makes reliably scaling down (and thus keep making a profit) easier, starting with getting rid of SREs.
We have similar movement going on with Xing here in Hamburg, Germany (once conceived as a LinkedIn competitor).
Great names that still have a lot of momentum, but are expected by ownership to slow down.
Reminds me of Scott Galloway’s most profitable investment having been a yellow pages company. Yes, the market shrunk, but they could shrink running costs as fast or even faster.
Any company that switches from real hardware to "the cloud" is going to triple their compute costs. They're obviously making too much money. With them not even selling their old hardware, they are doing the equivalent of setting large piles of money on fire
This is a terrible waste. Wiping all storage would take a day at best; this hardware is still worth $10-50k. They could donate it.
Then again, they’re migrating to Azure and the whole thing ran for years on SQL Server; being good at tech was never these ex-MS guys’ strong suit. This kind of forklifting is expected from this specific type of corporate droid, it’s how they’ve always done it. Entire industries run just like this, and it’s terrible and stupid.
"Stack Overflow no longer has any physical datacenters or offices; we are fully in the cloud and remote!"
Am I misunderstanding something here? They're just transferring from a physical datacenter owned and managed directly by them, to a small rented/leased part of those owned and managed by someone bigger. Since digital data can't just exist in a magical, airy fairy realm, it has to physically be somewhere either way.
Wouldn't it have been safer to control their own physical servers, considering how they mention protecting user information?
"For security reasons (and to protect the PII of all our users and customers), everything was being shredded and/or destroyed" - what!? That is ridiculous. The only possible thing you need to destroy would be the hard drives. Why on earth would you shred everything?
This is common compliance nomenclature. The only people paying the high cost to have a full sized piece of equipment destroyed are governments or R&D companies with unique prototypes.
The hard drives are most likely being shredded since that is a common practice and certification feature offered by most disposal companies.
The servers are being "destroyed" because thats how they will be accounted for in inventory and tax purposes to account for full depreciation. The company isn't "selling" the servers to the disposal company so they are marked as "destroyed."
Unless specified in the contract the disposal company will sell the chassis without the drives to a reseller or if they are being paid to dispose of the system, they will separate the components and recycle the metal.
The same goes for the power and network cables, they will go off to a recycler, its how disposal companies off-set their pricing.
OK that's much more reasonable. Hoping you are correct.
Also thought that was quite wasteful. Even ethernet cables are cut. Why not just put them online for free pickup?
Also I can't help wondering if the switch to cloud makes sense for stack overflow now again because their traffic collapsed. I took the whole post as something that should be mourned a bit, not gleefully destroyed.
Free pickup? at a secure data center?
Lets use some logic here. The disposal company is taking the cables with them to recycle them for the copper wire. Same with power cables.
They're cables, someone can pick them up and move them somewhere else. Some more logic for ya
It's as if they believe some bytes of PII might be recoverable from residual capacitance in twisted pairs of copper...
I would say they evaluated it would cost more for them to remove the HDD and sell the machine than just shred them. And they would not risk to forget a HDD inside
This sounds like laziness disguised as security, lol.
The last couple places I've worked at did this with their old equipment too. It always drove me a little nuts.
Related:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3248911 - Why Stack Exchange Isn’t in the Cloud (2011)
The original blog post is down but available here: http://web.archive.org/web/20120120201529/http://blog.server...
Worthy of a re-submit / retry, but also: posted 15h ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44604696
The reasoning could be that this makes reliably scaling down (and thus keep making a profit) easier, starting with getting rid of SREs.
We have similar movement going on with Xing here in Hamburg, Germany (once conceived as a LinkedIn competitor).
Great names that still have a lot of momentum, but are expected by ownership to slow down.
Reminds me of Scott Galloway’s most profitable investment having been a yellow pages company. Yes, the market shrunk, but they could shrink running costs as fast or even faster.
"physical" datacenter ?
whats the alternative? a datacenter that exists only in my imagination?
That would be imperfect.
Blog post from 2016, detailing the setup: https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the-ar...
It's a bit of a shame, but I guess also with declining traffic and revenue, they're also downsizing.
Any company that switches from real hardware to "the cloud" is going to triple their compute costs. They're obviously making too much money. With them not even selling their old hardware, they are doing the equivalent of setting large piles of money on fire
Have they never heard of remote hands? The cloud will be much more expensive than than what you would pay for someone to replace a hard drive for you.
This is a terrible waste. Wiping all storage would take a day at best; this hardware is still worth $10-50k. They could donate it.
Then again, they’re migrating to Azure and the whole thing ran for years on SQL Server; being good at tech was never these ex-MS guys’ strong suit. This kind of forklifting is expected from this specific type of corporate droid, it’s how they’ve always done it. Entire industries run just like this, and it’s terrible and stupid.
"We like burning money, and hardware, on fire."
... and like fall for marketing pitches
"Stack Overflow no longer has any physical datacenters or offices; we are fully in the cloud and remote!"
Am I misunderstanding something here? They're just transferring from a physical datacenter owned and managed directly by them, to a small rented/leased part of those owned and managed by someone bigger. Since digital data can't just exist in a magical, airy fairy realm, it has to physically be somewhere either way.
Wouldn't it have been safer to control their own physical servers, considering how they mention protecting user information?
The cloud is just someone else's datacenter.