This is what amazes me. I suspect there's an entire generation of developers and technologists that don't realize we used to manage infrastructure and deploy ap

This is what amazes me. I suspect there's an entire generation of developers and technologists that don't realize we used to manage infrastructure and deploy applications ontop of it. It's like as if somehow, in many eyes, that's impossible now. Depending on your scale, it may be impractical given external hosting options but it's certainly not impossible. Lots of data centers rose and started automated processes of shared hosting and co-locating hardware which was a step forward. I remember working with Rackspace, Equinix, The Planet, etc. which further automated quicker server deployment, had applications for UPS resets/interrupts, etc. The more you moved towards a specific business's automation services, the less portable your infrastructure was outside that environment. That continued on until you now have more sophisticated hosting like what AWS and GC provide. Now, abstractions exist for about everything in a data center and the trade off is that you now have to manage all that complexity through proprietary APIs, consoles, and so forth. In addition, the tradeoff here is the more complex the infrastructure, the less easy it is to shift it to another provider. That may be fine for you, it may also not be. It's all definitely possible though.