> ancient skills https://youtu.be/ZtYU87QNjPw?&t=10

It baffles me that my career trajectory somehow managed to insulate me from ever having to deal with the cloud, while such esoteric skills as swapping a hot swap disk or racking and cabling a new blade chassis are apparently on the order of finding a COBOL developer now. Really?

I can promise you that large financial institutions still have datacenters. Many, many, many datacenters!

we had two racks in our office of mostly developers. If you have an office you already have a rack for switches and patch panels. Adding a few servers is obvious.

Software development isn't a typical SME however. Mike's Fish and Chips will not buy a server and that's fine.