I dunno, I've done it both ways. I spent about a decade in small companies using all sorts of different kinds of ops solutions, from custom bash scripts on bare

I dunno, I've done it both ways. I spent about a decade in small companies using all sorts of different kinds of ops solutions, from custom bash scripts on bare metal to capistrano on on-prem VMs to chef on those VMs to chef on AWS to heroku and some things in between all that. I did not at all see all the devops changes of the last five years as unnecessary complexity, I felt all the pain that solutions like those from hashicorp and docker and kubernetes are trying to soothe. And then I went and got a job at a big company with a mature containerized deployment infrastructure and it's just better. It's not like it's easy, but it totally solves the "blank sheet of paper" problem. You don't have to invent some deployment scheme to prototype or launch a new service, you just go figure out how to write the config code and where to put the build artifacts and run a couple commands and voila. Yes, it requires up front investment to get to that point, but if you see yourself as the kind of company that is going to be iterating on new ideas, entering new markets, creating new products, solving scaling problems, just anything that ends up with a lot of cycles of launching new services, then I really think the investment is worth it. Maybe that's still a niche case, maybe not many businesses really fit this, but honestly those that don't aren't really the kinds of businesses I want to work for.