[dottedmag]

Author here. As correctly guessed in other comments: cloud infrastructure.

To make public IPs and volumes hotpluggable without a guest agent running inside every VM one has to manage them in a way guest OS will handle hotplug using regular mechanisms. For volumes it's PCIe storage hotplug, for public IPs it's PCIe network card hotplug.

If a VM is used as a Kubernetes worker, couple of dozen volumes and public IPs attached is not an unlikely situation.