Yaknow I actually transitioned from doing dev stuff to ops at a smallish startup. I was brought in to help with a green field rewrite. Eventually it became cle

Yaknow I actually transitioned from doing dev stuff to ops at a smallish startup. I was brought in to help with a green field rewrite. Eventually it became clear just how much of a mess the deployment environments were so I cleaned everything up and parameterized things so that when we went to stand up the new production environment it was quick and painless. I got hired on at megacorp to do pretty much that with a suite of green field apps. And so I did, across a few apps and a zillion different environments because all of a sudden spinning up a new integrated environment was easy. The devs ran a lot of stuff locally but still had cloud based playgrounds to use before they hit the staging environments. Perhaps the best part though was having the CI stuff hooked into appropriate integrations, so even if you couldn't run it locally you sure as shit tested it before it hit staging. SOC2 compliance was painful for the company but not so much for us. If you're sensing a theme with "green field" you'd be on to something. Even in a largeish company it's not so much the complexity as it is the legacy stuff that'll get you. Some legacy stuff will just never be flexible (e.g. the 32-bit Windows crap we begged Amazon to let us keep running) and even the most flexible software will have enough inertia to make change painful. Tangentially this is also why I get apprehensive when I see stuff like that linux-only redis competitor.