Comment by aranelsurion

People really look through rose-colored glasses when they talk about late 90s, early 2000s or whenever is their "back then" when they talk about everything being simpler.

Everything was for sure simpler, but also the requirements and expectations were much, much lower. Tech and complexity moved forward with goal posts also moving forward.

Just one example on reliability, I remember popular websites with many thousands if not millions of users would put an "under maintenance" page whenever a major upgrade comes through and sometimes close shop for hours. If the said maintenance goes bad, come tomorrow because they aren't coming up.

Proper HA, backups, monitoring were luxuries for many, and the kind of self-healing, dynamically autoscaled, "cattle not pet" infrastructure that is now trivialized by Kubernetes were sci-fi for most. Today people consider all of this and a lot more as table stakes.

It's easy to shit on cloud and kubernetes and yearn for the simpler Linux-on-a-box days, yet unless expectations somehow revert back 20-30 years, that isn't coming back.