[duxup]

Short:

The old way straight up setting up a new server could eat hours of time, let alone the network, etc ... now I can copy and paste.... and I know there are no variations, someone didn't miss a setting, and so forth.

That's a crazy big cost saving.

Longer:

Physical hardware is hard.

I worked with data center networking for a long time and the efforts to generic-ify everything enough to be predictable was endless.

Eventually you have so much identical redundancy and when VMs came around you just wondered ... "wait this has to be able to go farther" and here we are.