In my experience it's pretty common to stretch your infra out much longer than 18-24 months. Often finance has a 3 year depreciation schedule, and depending on

In my experience it's pretty common to stretch your infra out much longer than 18-24 months. Often finance has a 3 year depreciation schedule, and depending on your needs, you can keep existing workloads on existing hardware for many more years. The last time I ran physical infra, we had sever racks that I'd originally bought, running in production 5+ years later. Once you're past the depreciation schedule, they are basically free except for power and space. Yeah, at some point and scale, it can make sense to get new gear that is more power and space efficient to pack more into the same power and cooling budget. AWS still lets me launch c1-c6 instance types. So they still have the older generations sticking around. Yeah, the newer ones are usually more cost effective, but you do have to do work to migrate to them.