> how many people (including on client teams) does it take to manage this much sprawl? Being remotely familiar something with similar complexity, I say "very f

> how many people (including on client teams) does it take to manage this much sprawl? Being remotely familiar something with similar complexity, I say "very few". Automation is not one time, it is ongoing. You start with something small, and you build, and build, and build. I saw a presentation from maybe 5-6 years back talking about Apple Cassandra, and have talked to some engineers too when they used to have DataStax Cassandra summits. Their automation has probably scaled up from those days. Maybe their infrastructure grows by X% every year (X probably being a double digit number) and their automation increases their productivity / reduces their overhead by X/2%, it allows them to still retain a huge growth trajectory at a smaller increase in people costs. Improve productivity by X% or more (with new automation), and you have hit a home run. And they should not be asking "by what percentage should I optimize", but simply "where do we spend effort today and how can we reduce it" ... which any business or group should be doing it anyways. The biggest challenges with such things come when management changes strategy for various reasons because then you lose a year or 2, and then you fall really behind and need to do so much catch up just to catch breath.