[fweespeech]

> Is this true? At my last company we wasted a bunch of time every week dealing with the accumulation of ad-hoc changes in different environments creating different behavior.

That is an issue a disciplined one-man operation won't have since (generally) they have a Dev and a Prod environment, the changes would be made in Dev first then duplicated in Prod.

If you have 2+ developers, you have environment drift like you experienced because (generally) Dev is the local environment on the laptop or otherwise a distinct environment for each developer. So now you have 3+ environments you need to sync and then discipline starts to fall apart as you have to communicate every change.

[throwaway894345]

What happens to the disciplined single dev when their EC2 instance falls over in either environment? How do you get things back in sync without code to automatically stand things up in the right state? And if you're going through the work of writing/maintaining that code, are you saving anything over using Kubernetes (consider out of the box, Kubernetes gives you logging, ssh, process management, service discovery, etc)?

[fweespeech]

Not everyone uses EC2 which is prone to fall over.

And the disciplined single dev documents their changes. That is why it works in a 1 man shop but not at scale, there is always someone who is unreliable once the group gets large enough.