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This really doesn’t work in practice. We brought down our whole compute cluster once when someone ran update and it changed some stupid thing.

It will happen to you sooner or later also. Updates are always out of band for this reason.

That’s why everybody does builds and isolates isolates updates to that process.

> We brought down our whole compute cluster once when someone ran update and it changed some stupid thing

I've seen this happen twice now, as well.

I feel like we’re close to that with automated testing and rollbacks. Still, it seems like a ton of complexity for what feels like a fundamental need

If it's one VM for a personal website that'll be fine. Good luck explaining that to a SOC2 auditor, or managing that across a fleet.

Nooo I can't run that, I need to pay for Bezos 3rd yacht!

that is not nearly enough. You need to make sure the system still works after the update, so you need to carefully control all the versions that go in, test them in lower environments. Also, for any serious application, you will need to do this multiple times, for hundreds or thousands of machines even for small companies.

I am on your side, actually, I think managing machines is better than serverless, but it's not that easy.

a recipe for getting exploited by a supply chain attack