Comment by solatic

And you can get desktop workstations with similarly high core counts and RAM. You're missing the point. Your strategy can either depend on whether or not you can afford to buy out larger and larger vertically scaled servers, or you can plan for horizontal scaling. Almost nobody is willing to sign off on the vertical scaling strategy because the sheer presence of a ceiling frightens executives.

And yes, in enterprise, two things are usually at play: you need to test a system where the architecture includes the combined architecture of multiple corporate acquisitions, more than one of which were Vertical Monsters, and more than one of which presumed horizontal scaling; and where deployment scripts must be run from behind a no-ingress-permitted firewall, which means having workload orchestration runners installed behind that firewall.