[deltarholamda]

I think the flexibility of the ideal is part of what makes it so attractive. "Boring" may mean some pretty cutting-edge technology because your team is so thoroughly steeped in it that they know it back to front.

For me, "boring" means avoiding things like Kubernetes because it's an ecosystem with which I am woefully unfamiliar and I can more or less achieve with other (possibly less efficient) means.

Ted Dziuba made a point a while back that the three tools for systems engineering are money, time, and code, and they should be used in that order. It's a sort of shorthand for "boring" to just buy a bigger server, or spend the time to leverage existing and know Unix tools, and then if all that fails, use some gimcrack new tech to solve your problems.

(Though, I'd say that the biggest impediment to leveraging "boring" technologies is correctly determining what your problem is. Sometimes we focus on the wrong metrics, or the right metrics at the wrong time, and that skews our decision making.)