[agrajag]

This is absolutely a problem that interacts with scale. With 1M servers you’re almost certainly dealing with hundreds of service owners, and some of those are going to need additional features you don’t have to worry about with 100 servers. Some examples are databases with graceful failover, long running AI model training jobs, or distributed databases like etc where you have to be mindful about how many can be down at a time.

It’s not 10,000x harder to patch that 10,000x more machines, but it’s not 1x either. Easily 10-20x harder, if not more.

[natbennett]

And at a certain scale patches will come out faster than you can deploy them!

[phyzome]

What you're describing has nothing to do with the number of servers and everything to do with the number of services.

That's not scale, that's organizational sprawl.