Something I think a lot of people struggle with, both on the  Dev side and the Ops side, is to think of VMs and containers as completely disposable. Does it add value, or help you, for you to have an emotional attachment to this server?<p>Instead of doing OS updates, application updates, code updates, and configuration updates to 50 identical webservers that live behind load balancers, it might be faster to upgrade one. Then that one can be templated, cloned and deployed and replace the currently operating ones. There&#x27;s still server name, IP address, and other configuration that has to be automated, and sometimes automating this is harder than automating all that patching, sometimes not.<p>This obviates server histories. True - you can&#x27;t say &quot;This VM has always performed better than the others&quot; since you get a new farm of VMs every month. While many see that as a downside, it&#x27;s actually a benefit that you don&#x27;t need to think about that data.