[amluto]

I’ve never worked at a company with these particular problems, but:

#1: A cloud VM comes with an obligation for someone at the company to maintain it. The cloud does not excuse anyone from doing this.

#2: Sounds like a dysfunctional system. Sure, it may be common, but a medium sized org could easily have some datacenter space and allow any team to rent a server or an instance, or to buy a server and pay some nominal price for the IT team to keep it working. This isn’t actually rocket science.

Sure, keeping a fifteen year old server working safely is a chore, but so is maintaining a fifteen-year-old VM instance!

[j45]

The cloud is someone else’s computer.

Having redirected of a vm provider or installing a hyper visor on equipment is another thing.

[icedchai]

Obligation? Far from it. I've worked at some poorly staffed companies. Nobody is maintaining old VMs or container images. If it works, nobody touches it.

I worked at a supposedly properly staffed company that had raised 100's of millions in investment, and it was the same thing. VMs running 5 year old distros that hadn't been updated in years. 600 day uptimes, no kernel patches, ancient versions of Postgres, Python 2.7 code everywhere, etc. This wasn't 10 years ago. This was 2 years ago!