Regarding swap partitions: on virtualised systems (like clouds) this is rather easy since you can just edit EBS/LUN/whatever on the provider side, grow, shrink,

Regarding swap partitions: on virtualised systems (like clouds) this is rather easy since you can just edit EBS/LUN/whatever on the provider side, grow, shrink, add completely new ones without doing any of the classical disk management tasks. On cloud machines, LVM doesn't make a lot of sense, and neither does lots of partitions. Partitions are from a time where you have one disk and want to setup filesystem boundaries. But in a virtualised setup you can slice block storage any way you want, and present it to the VM as completely separate disks. It's a bit like having LVM "on the outside" of the VM. This way, the VM itself becomes simpler and has to care less about the specifics of the disk. If you are on physical hardware, I'd argue that if you're not using LVM or ZFS, you're probably doing it wrong. Only really small scale (SD card, eMMC, USB SSD, raspberry PI type of stuff) works better without it. That said, even LVM wouldn't be too bad in such cases. (You'd have to get down to JFFS2 and the likes to really not use LVM)