Is S.O. a good example of a complicated/large distributed system? I couldn't find any quick googleable results on how many people work on their site.

The reason I ask is I'm working on a product with 30-ish different pods/teams (maybe about 200 - 250 engineers) working on their respective modules, microservices, etc. From my understanding with talking to a lot of others at conferences, is that our distributed system is fairly small (in terms of functional modules/teams, transactions, etc..).

Anyway, even at our small-ish scale, I couldn't imaging running our platform as a single app that were were able to scale up with better hardware.

Also, I think how a company supports multi-tenanting would play a big role in deciding how this works, too, because you can have scenario with a monolith and DB but you have it partitioned by individual tenant dbs, app servers, etc, and you still have a huge pile of hardware (real or virtual) you're dancing around in....

My point is that Stack Overflow seems to have kept things as simple as possible, the opposite of a "complicated distributed system". It seems to be a classical relational databases backed app with some additions for specific parts where it needed to scale. In the end I guess it is distributed but it looks like its based largely around a monolith.

https://stackexchange.com/performance

> Anyway, even at our small-ish scale, I couldn't imaging running our platform as a single app that were were able to scale up with better hardware.

Lots of 250+ engineer teams out there working on monoliths.

Distributed systems (and specifically microservices) are oftentimes solutions to organizational problems, not technical ones.

Their developers can't write good stuff on their resume though. How will those poor chaps get another job without writing Kubernetes, NoSQL, distributed database, large scale horizonatally scalable systems. /s

AFAIK, writing "Used a large machine to solve customer problems quickly and efficiently" is not really taken well by a lot of people. The majority of companies can better scale up, than out, but out is the new normal for various reasons.

They're using NoSQL and other things. It's mostly Microsoft C# stack though.

What NoSQL? According to their blog they use SQL server.

That’s the problem. Doing the reasonable thing is a career killer.

The notion that stack overflow is small and scaling up is long obsolete. It's running on more than a hundred servers now.

Not according to this:

https://stackexchange.com/performance

Where do you get your numbers from?

Yep, and if you look at average CPU load percentage, it's usually in single digits.