A dozen servers would be pushing it. It's not the size of the fleet, it's the consistency and repeatability of configuration and deployment. I assume there are

A dozen servers would be pushing it. It's not the size of the fleet, it's the consistency and repeatability of configuration and deployment. I assume there are other, non-production servers: various dev environments, test/QA. How do you ensure every environment is built to spec without some level of automation? It's the old "pets" vs "cattle" argument. I've worked at companies with their own data centers and manual configuration. Every system was a pet.