[atmosx]

I've worked with quite a few small teams in the past, part time. Never had a fleet as small as 2 VMs, more like 20-120. That's a good summary. Only thing missing that comes up always is the CI/CD workflow. I've found bitbucket's CD surprisingly _good_ once you follow the enforced pattern, especially for small teams who don't want to spent too much on release technicalities.

Then there's more nuanced things that most teams will miss early on without someone pointing the problem and the solution e.g. decouple configuration from the app, design stateless apps (e.g. 12 factor app), use secrets management easily (e.g. dynamoDB based solutions like credstash are dirt cheap, AWS secrets is okay-ish), used managed DBs (RDS is the most common choice) and more.

[aprdm]

really ? Wow.. I've never had 120 VMs to manage in any org I was part of, and have worked on fortune 500 companies !

I have provided infrastructure-as-a-service for many many baremetal/VMS/containers, but then I wasn't managing them (e.g: it was many small team's infra, not a small team of 10 people using 20-120 VMs as per OP)

[atmosx]

That didn’t come out well - by VMs I mean EKS or Swarm nodes not VMs in term of “pet” not “cattle” :-)

The number of nodes was used to run a monolith. Same deployments and all, wasn’t as complicated as it might sound (terraform to manage infra, few custom apps to talk to external APIs, etc)

These were definitely not 500 fortune companies but AFAIK all of them had some cash flow or were acquired by behemoths.