The reality is most places keep running software architected for an era over 2 decades ago now and it’s ossifying harder if it’s still carrying enough business

The reality is most places keep running software architected for an era over 2 decades ago now and it’s ossifying harder if it’s still carrying enough business inertia. Those workflows of bootstrapping VMs and EC2 instances like it’s 1996 are not going away because to do anything cloud native in your architecture you need cloud native software, and usually if you can get a container you can get an RPM or Deb and play package jockey rejecting the new technologies literally meant to do half the work for you. In most of the cases where places just dump money it’s usually a question of labor cost spent to optimize vs the gains, and unless your business is built around scaling a lot of small customers like the usual SaaS unicorns customer acquisition is super long, painful, and technical inefficiency is the default for enterprise as a rule. It’s worth paying $200 for a $1 part because the overhead and risk of renegotiating anything is not worth it. When an hour long meeting essentially costs a minimum of $1000 to a company essentially, it’d better be worth it. When it comes to ASIC designs and VLSI the technical debt is pretty different because each generation of hardware has past benchmarks primarily to drive it forward. Oftentimes in software people tend to want to keep things the same which discourages innovation or touching.