>My experience of the last five years is so heavily weighted to (effectively) immutable infrastructure that checking to see who had been on a box hadn't event c

>My experience of the last five years is so heavily weighted to (effectively) immutable infrastructure that checking to see who had been on a box hadn't event crossed my mind. In web scale production, you mostly have to worry about your fellow sysadmins troubleshooting the problem, and they mostly won't be too mad about you clearing state. But not everything is web scale production. Productionizing an app is a lot of work. Yes, yes, "Cloud is reliable!" and that's kinda true if you write your application to deal with any failure at any time. the reality is that the hardware can and will sometimes go away without warning, and you can't call up your oncall and tell them to head to the datacenter to fix it. all that recovery is done at the application layer; you had better hope you managed to make the data redundant enough. The whole idea behind the "cloud" is to take most of the lower level sysadmin work and make developers do it; and that's a fine way to some things, but... not so fine when it comes to other things. (This is the value proposition of a VPS system rather than a "cloud" instance. when the hardware a VPS is on goes down, some poor bastard's pager goes off, and they are expected to wake up, drag themselves to the datacenter and fix it. The gamble is "is being down for a few hours now and again, when you can reasonably expect to be brought back up in the same configuration cheaper than writing your software such that you can always start over on a new node?" The VPS is for the former, the "Cloud" for the latter.) Add to that, well, a lot of businesses need to run proprietary software. I personally, well, let us just say that for the last three years, the systems I am dealing with at work involve FlexLM. so corp and smaller sites are littered with one-off systems... systems where if they break, a pager goes off, and someone fixes the problem. Sometimes that works better than the "web scale" stuff... like I've yet to see a "web scale" posix-ish filesystem that meets the user expectations the way NFS does, and I've never seen a nfs server that didn't require someone on pager.