> "A stable foundation is important" It all depends on what kind of apps you are deploying and supporting. While I wasn't even discussing immutable systems i

> "A stable foundation is important" It all depends on what kind of apps you are deploying and supporting. While I wasn't even discussing immutable systems in this capacity, some workflows work better for .com style applications. In a typical bank environment where you have thousands of legacy applications floating around, you are more apt to not be able to control the architecture and need to push out security updates. In place updates here are fine, however, I still wouldn't want to do an in-place dist-upgrade across all of those systems, and then find out which ones of those thousand applications had problems. In this case, it's better to redeploy those applications if they need a new OS and the OS is no longer recieving security updates - and try to shift some of that burden onto those who maintain the application. If you are just deploying a .com app though, you need a good backup/DR strategy, and it helps to be able to redeploy everything and take steps to not get attached to state on that machine.