The author's relationship with the machine reminds me of Scotty in
Start Trek. In the age of "the cloud" that kind of engineering
intimacy feels like something lost in days of yore.
As Sun used to put it, The Network is the Computer.
From the point of view of cloud providers, standing up a cloud service is enormously complex, filled with interesting distributed computing problems, especially under scale, diverse tenancy (and the predators that attracts), diverse workloads, and creative consumers finding ways to use it that you hadn't considered.
It wasn't YAML, but was just as messy.