As of today, Stack Overflow now deploys HTTPS by default on StackOverflow.com — as well as the hundreds of Q&A communities that make up our Stack Exchange network. We now redirect all traffic to https://, and Google links will change over the next few weeks. Sounds simple, right? But getting to this point has taken years of work. Four years, to be exact. Nick Craver, Stack Overflow architecture lead, documents this journey on his personal blog in the post, HTTPS on Stack Overflow: The End of a Long Road. He offers a detailed, comprehensive look at the technical issues that make Stack Overflow’s rollout unique, as well as the steps we took to solve them. Nick says, “While Stack Overflow is not unique in the problems we faced along the way, the combination of problems is fairly rare. I hope you find some details of our trials, tribulations, mistakes, victories, and even some open source projects that resulted along the way to be helpful.”
How Stack Overflow Flipped the Switch on HTTPS
