The Architecture of Stack Overflow

Stack Overflow, and its Q&A network Stack Exchange, have been growing exponentially for the last five years. They now encompass:

~120 Q&A sites
~5 million users
~10 million questions
~15 million answers

In this talk, I will describe:

The physical architecture of Stack Overflow. How many servers are there? What is their purpose and what are their specs?

The logical architecture of the software. How do we scale up? What are the main building blocks of our software?

The tooling system. What supports our extreme optimization philosophy?

The development team. What are our core values? What footprint do we want to leave as developers?