[fooblat]

In my experience, adding more VMs when capacity is needed is trivial to automate on a platform like AWS. With real physical machines it takes advanced planning and actual physical work to deploy more machines. Even with a managed hosting provider there is work to do to automate the provisioning.

[bryanlarsen]

Adding a new bare metal machine or a new VM to the setup in the original article is exactly the same amount of work, automated or not.

[fooblat]

How so? If I need a new VM I just click (or make an api call) and it's almost instantly ready to go. If I want a new physical server I have to order it and get it delivered to my cage and then have someone rack and wire it before I can even start provisioning. There is a lot more involved in the second case.