[shadowgovt]

It's important I think to note the head fake that Google's engineering pulled off when they developed site reliability as its own discipline.

It's maintenance, but the argument they successfully sold to management was that if management planned to scale indefinitely, maintenance cost would also scale indefinitely unless maintenance also had a budget for R&D to push up the ratio of services maintained to maintainers (and the authority to tell software engineering "Yes, you built a new shiny thing, but it's not shaped correctly yet to be maintainable so here is the pager, enjoy your 2:00 a.m. wake up calls to keep the money flowing").

This has, overall, worked pretty well for them given what they want to do. While maintenance is still a cost, it's understood that they minimize that cost via R&D, not cutting.