Place I worked until recently had (and probably still has) the majority of the site running on bare metal. Java stack, home grown RPC framework, home grown rele

Place I worked until recently had (and probably still has) the majority of the site running on bare metal. Java stack, home grown RPC framework, home grown release system that boiled down to a whole lot of rsync and ssh commands by one controller script which knew how to do things in parallel. Configuration was through files which lived in source control. Our servers were hand packed, which would have sucked except we had a fairly limited number of (gigantic) services. We handled load on the order of millions of requests per minute. It actually worked surprisingly well. Our biggest pain point was slow startup times from giant services and sometimes needing to move groups of services around when load got too heavy.