Comment by DrBazza

> How did deployment become such an arcane skill?

Prior to industry wide "solutions" such as Docker, or rather linux namespaces and cgroups, there was no obvious process isolation, so "deployment" was copying tarballs or using Windows installers.

Also, investment banks want "support" from vendors, so hardware was either Windows servers (mostly for Exchange and AD), or Sun Solaris boxes.

So although linux cgroups came around 2006 (?) and namespaces in 2001 (?), banks didn't do too much with linux until after 2005 (when Redhat were providing the aforementioned 'support'). I don't think the 'industry' widely recognised the potential of cgroups and namespaces.