You need to have one person who can run apt-get upgrade a few times. Most of the good development and operations people are capable of it in my experience at le

You need to have one person who can run apt-get upgrade a few times. Most of the good development and operations people are capable of it in my experience at least. It requires at most a few days upfront and a couple hours of monthly work to keep things up to date. It's not remotely comparable to re-developing the whole system. If your developers can maintain their own machines, they can probably handle this.