The worst thing about the whole kubernetes-cult and the like is that IaC and CM was supposed to help us reduce configuration, to make it less prone to failure and easier to manage.

But the truth is that we ran service based architecture, network meshes and containers with bash just fine before cloud everything, usually with less effort than it is to do literally anything today. Sure you had to know how to set up network bonding and how to tune your systems.

Very, very few people and businesses _needs_ kubernetes or it's cousins. Most just need a decent system administrator.

I agree with you, but can offer a counterpoint. A system administrator might setup a server in a certain way, and if they leave the replacement has a hard time discovering what they did.

With IaC, all decisions are templated in the code and the replacement has full insight into the state of the machine.

As I hope decent system administrator... turns out I find running minimal kubernetes setup (k3s is great there) more sensible and cheaper than managing the server in classic way.