I think too many people in this sub-thread are harping on this excerpt, especially with regard to the "hand-managed" and failing to take the most charitable reading, as exhorted by the guidelines.
What commenters are, perhaps, failing to grasp, is that if there are only 3 (or even 6) servers in the environment, and each one has a unique configuration, then they're all, by some definition, hand-managed.
No amount of "automation" will reduce that fundamental administrative/cognitive burden.
Sure, there are some sensible best practices, even for that scenario, like, at minimum, storing config in version control. However, going all-in on a CM system (or, perhaps, Kubernetes) for 100 servers when all you have is 3 is, at best, premature optimization. There's a well-known aphorism in tech about that.
Heh, yeah. I realized after the third reply that my phrasing had turned into a downvote magnet.
There's also the problem that the cluster itself becomes a failure point. It too needs to run on physical servers that need to be provisioned and managed. Anyone who can fat-finger a regular iron server configuration can muck up a kubernetes deployment.
Ultimately, the top of the stack is always "hand-managed" in some sense. Even AWS has had user-induced failures.
I think too many people in this sub-thread are harping on this excerpt, especially with regard to the "hand-managed" and failing to take the most charitable reading, as exhorted by the guidelines.
What commenters are, perhaps, failing to grasp, is that if there are only 3 (or even 6) servers in the environment, and each one has a unique configuration, then they're all, by some definition, hand-managed.
No amount of "automation" will reduce that fundamental administrative/cognitive burden.
Sure, there are some sensible best practices, even for that scenario, like, at minimum, storing config in version control. However, going all-in on a CM system (or, perhaps, Kubernetes) for 100 servers when all you have is 3 is, at best, premature optimization. There's a well-known aphorism in tech about that.