They've also lost COMPLEXITY, and this always pays off, even if in roundabout ways that you cannot measure, and even if it's only for the positive effects on the mental-health of the engineers working on this!
Really... modern WordPress is a very complicated beast and keeping all sorts of details about how you need to optimize it, server, caching, db in you head is just no worth it. Yeah, "changing two lines in the nginx configuration" could have worked, but imho simply the cost of keeping in your head the information about what two lines to change is just too large. As it grows, it simply drives you insane by how many technical trivialities you need to keep in your head to keep it working smoothly, when you could instead use that brainpower so solve the really interesting problems.
An the fact that "their marketing team has to use the Github interface and learn Markdown" is also a hidden benefit, if you think about all the subtle frontend bugs that happen when somebody uses the WYSIWYG editor of WP and they end up with a combination of styles that breaks the layout. For any project above a certain size, the "dumb WIM" (What I Mean) interface of Markdown always trumps the WYSIWYG.
Also, the benefit of mostly NOT HAVING TO THINK ABOUT SECURITY AT ALL is freaking HUGE! Developers can simply say "it's the server guys' problem" now. Forget about having to manually audit the code of 3rd party plugins if you really care about security. And forget about updating and realizing something breaks and you have to fix it.
For any fast growing company, keep this in mind: REDUCE COMPLEXITY. ALWAYS. NO MATTER HOW LARGE THE SHORT TERM COST.
Just as an aside to WordPress optimization, so there are two ways to do that. One of them is to analyze content flow (how often are things updated) and traffic flow and then come up with a reasonable strategy. Things like use memcaching for sidebars, separate those out depending whether you need to, then work on caching plugins. The caching plugins need work because they tend to be programmed to allow robots to spider uncached content, which makes no sense to me. Robot traffic on high volume sites is just insane. With a hundred blogs or so on a multisite installation you could easily spend a month doing postmortems and hunting down the least common denominator (oh hello switch_to_blog, why do you use 36 MB of RAM on each call?)
Or, you can slap some ram sticks in the machine, install varnish-cache, write a few rules for it and go play minecraft the other 29 days.
> As it grows, it simply drives you insane by how many technical trivialities you need to keep in your head to keep it working smoothly
For everything else there's Ansible.
We've taken the approach to not type a single command into a live server's console and use CM tools to document and automate. This, along with well written operating documentation can be invaluable.
Really... modern WordPress is a very complicated beast and keeping all sorts of details about how you need to optimize it, server, caching, db in you head is just no worth it. Yeah, "changing two lines in the nginx configuration" could have worked, but imho simply the cost of keeping in your head the information about what two lines to change is just too large. As it grows, it simply drives you insane by how many technical trivialities you need to keep in your head to keep it working smoothly, when you could instead use that brainpower so solve the really interesting problems.
An the fact that "their marketing team has to use the Github interface and learn Markdown" is also a hidden benefit, if you think about all the subtle frontend bugs that happen when somebody uses the WYSIWYG editor of WP and they end up with a combination of styles that breaks the layout. For any project above a certain size, the "dumb WIM" (What I Mean) interface of Markdown always trumps the WYSIWYG.
Also, the benefit of mostly NOT HAVING TO THINK ABOUT SECURITY AT ALL is freaking HUGE! Developers can simply say "it's the server guys' problem" now. Forget about having to manually audit the code of 3rd party plugins if you really care about security. And forget about updating and realizing something breaks and you have to fix it.
For any fast growing company, keep this in mind: REDUCE COMPLEXITY. ALWAYS. NO MATTER HOW LARGE THE SHORT TERM COST.