Stack Overflow, built on Microsoft technologies, reveals some impressive performance numbers

In a recent blog post, Nick Craver goes over some recent changes to Stack Overflow’s architecture. For the non-technical people out there, Stack Overflow is a website for experienced and novice programmers to find help to solve programming problems. Craver is a Software Developer and Systems Administrator for Stack Exchange and is responsible for keeping Stack Overflow up and running.

With over 4.7 million subscribers, Stack Overflow certainly has a great database of programming knowledge to help you solve even the most complex problems. Even Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise group, pointed out Carver’s post on Twitter.

Great write-up of Stack Overflow's architecture – it is an awesome .NET and SQL Server solution: https://t.co/DsvxND4Cbp

— Scott Guthrie (@scottgu) February 18, 2016

Craver posted extensive statistics taken from changes to Stack Overflow’s architecture from November 12, 2013 to February 9, 2016. Craver points out all the things that Stack Exchange needs at their disposal to run Stack Overflow and what changes they made from their hardware used in 2013:

• “4 Microsoft SQL Servers (new hardware for 2 of them)

• 11 IIS Web Servers (new hardware)

• 2 Redis Servers (new hardware)

• 3 Tag Engine servers (new hardware for 2 of the 3)

• 3 Elasticsearch servers (same)

• 4 HAProxy Load Balancers (added 2 to support CloudFlare)

• 2 Networks (each a Nexus 5596 Core + 2232TM Fabric Extenders, upgraded to 10Gbps everywhere)

• 2 Fortinet 800C Firewalls (replaced Cisco 5525-X ASAs)

• 2 Cisco ASR-1001 Routers (replaced Cisco 3945 Routers)

• 2 Cisco ASR-1001-x Routers (new!)”

For more detailed technical (programmer-speak) information, and pictures on all the changes that were made to Stack Overflow’s architecture, check out Nick Carver’s personal blog post.