When envisioning the architecture of Stack Overflow, many might imagine a complex system with microservices, event sourcing (CQRS), eventual consistency, sharding, heavy use of caching, and more. However, the reality is surprisingly straightforward. The actual architecture is monolithic, consisting of just nine web servers. This setup manages to efficiently handle the vast amount of traffic and data with a simple, robust design. The monolithic server interfaces with essential services such as Elastic Search for search functionality, Redis for caching, and a traditional database for data persistence. This revelation shows that sometimes, simpler solutions are more than sufficient to meet large-scale operational demands.