Last company I worked at, the application stack, after lots and lots of trimming, and memory tweaking, ran 14 servers. Hot Failover doubled that, Disaster reco

Last company I worked at, the application stack, after lots and lots of trimming, and memory tweaking, ran 14 servers. Hot Failover doubled that, Disaster recovery ran 3x. So, that was 42 servers per customer. We had 40+ customer - so, at last count, were at 1600+ servers, just for production applications - not including development, marketing, sales, finances, etc... And it was just a run-of-the-mill data ingestion company - nothing special. 1600 servers is only 80 racks - that's a small data center as things go - there are hundreds, if not thousands of companies with data centers that large. Now, at my current gig - we have 43 nodes - but each node can run 100+ k8s pods (and, they are beefy 768 GB nodes). Our administration overhead, in terms of people/effort/auditing is a fraction of what it was at the last gig. Also - Disaster and failover is just a matter of bringing up the clusters and persistent stores in another region. No need to keep compute on standby. This week, we're even doing a migration of a cluster from GKE to Azure. And it started out on AWS (though not in production) - I'm not in the sysadmin world anymore, but from what I've seen, things like k8s have made it a heckuva lot easier to do big things with fewer people.