My product is built with C# .NET too. However I'm not bought into the Microsoft platform at all. Example: Nancy[0] for REST APIs, Postgres for persistence (with Dapper[1] of course), ElasticSearch and so on.

Recently turned off my last Windows Server, I've converted all of the services into docker (mono) containers and making use of Rancher[2] for orchestration.

I am also using Node.js as an API gateway which fits in quite well.

[0] http://nancyfx.org

[1] https://github.com/StackExchange/dapper-dot-net

[2] http://rancher.com

I don't even know if some of these tools are made up or not anymore.

Chef Nancy is caching on Route 53

Still sounds made up.

It sounds even more made-up to me now...

I was under the impression IIS was leaps and bounds better than Linux based .net web servers. Thoughts on this having experienced the alternatives?

Nancy plays a lot nicer with "not IIS". With .net core it seems like IIS is destined to be a thing of the past anyway.

It may be better from a technical standpoint but unnecessary and less good depending on circumstances.

Sounds like you've got far too much going on there to be classified as boring. :)

How about your front end Web stack? I've read a lot about the Stack Exhchange backend, but not much about the front end. How quickly does development move on the front end? How do you test the front end? How subjectively maintainable does it seem to be? Any pressure or temptation to use one of the hip JS frameworks (if you're not already)?

Not the guy but their front end looks pleasantly simple and framework less. They use jquery. You can do view source and read the thing pretty much unlike say Facebook. They apparently have written their own websocket system to update the stuff at the top http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/168145/sockets-used-...

As a lowly .NET dev, thanks for leading the way to making us cool. I'm sure you guys have some fun whitepapers.

Have you considered non-propietary alternatives in your stack solely to reduce licencing?

I understand technology choices are shaped by many factors, I'm just curious.

The only significant licensing cost we have is SQL Server, and yes, we have considered alternatives, like PostgreSQL.

On one hand we would reduce costs by going to Postgres, on the other there would be a significant cost retuning all our SQL so to have an acceptable level of performance.

Do you rely on DBAs to help with that tuning and maintenance? Or are developers handling that?

Thank you! most of the kids these day love to build projects with those $fancy_new_stack technologies like if they were badges from the boy scouts.

How geographically distributed are stack overflow's servers?

We have two datacenters, one in New York, the other in Denver. Only one is active at any time. We also use Fastly for delivering static assets.

Thanks for dumping CloudFlare.

Is CloudFlare no longer the shiny new CDN of the month? If not, could you elucidate a bit more as to why they are not?

Thanks to you and your team. That's very impressive especially considering only 5% (max 15%) load on the CPU. Are the systems underutilized in this case, if so is there a reason?