Comment by stego-tech

A really good post that captures the IT perspective of infrastructure change and modernization over my career. They also hit the nail on the head that one of today's problems is itself automation, where we've built tools that let us create sprawling estates with no accountability for cost other than an opaque monthly bill, though I'd also chip in that said automation is often restricted to whoever your chief cloud provider is (AWS, Azure, etc).

Where I find myself advocating today is very much a "rational check" on infrastructure, and curtailing accordingly. We have the tooling to ensure high availability, but does everything need to be HA? Do our SLAs for enterprise tooling really need five-nines of availability, or can we knock some applications down to a limited schedule? Does dev/test need to be live 24/7, or can we power it off when not in use? Why are we only focusing on availability and not scalability? The list goes on, but they're also not popular in enterprises with entrenched politics, which admittedly is where I find myself struggling against the current. If my social chops were better, I suspect I'd thrive in consultancy doing just that.

All that being said, I do like containers that are done right (properly documented, secure-by-default, ready for scaling), and I continue driving more applications towards containerization in the enterprise where possible. They're the right solution for ~60-80% of enterprise use cases, with the difficulty being getting vendors on board with the idea that their software won't have a dedicated VM or hardware anymore (which everyone fiercely resists, because container-based licensing can be a PITA to them). For the rest, VMs are more than fine, and we have a growing number of ways for both to exist peacefully in the same environment. As this area of technology matures (along with "backporting" from hyperscalers to private cloud again) further, I'm really looking forward to managing global estates in smaller teams for bigger firms - things that VMs, Containers, and Infrastructure-as-Code allow.