the clear end goal here is that you have to deal with things like 'provisioning virtual disks' and 'doing ubuntu updates'. this whole virtualization thing received you of the burden of buying pci ethernet nics and rack mount brackets and provisioning cooling.
but really this whole business of writing chef recipes and provisioning harnesses is really the same kind stuff. it seems important because you can't run without it, and thats what your whole day is...but really its pretty secondary to what you're actually trying to accomplish (run a service)
its interesting to think about what that world might look like...someone is going to make something like that stick at some point. so...why are people provisioning their own containers/vms instead of using the higher level services right now?
For me at the very least it's cost -- I can purchase a cheap VPS and run a bunch of stuff on it, with full control for much cheaper than what an AWS EC2 instance costs monthly (with better specs).
The value provided by the services being managed is large, but honestly, for a lot of well-built infrastructure pieces, there is a lot of trust already for the services to not go down. Most startups/lifestyle companies/small businesses/whatever couldn't bring down a Postgres instance on a reasonably-provisioned machine if they tried (and the app is written with at least a smidgen of thought towards performance)
One of the aims of LinuxKit https://github.com/linuxkit/linuxkit is to show that you absolutely can do without the "doing ubuntu updates" and "writing chef recipes" stuff - you just write a single config file that specifies the whole OS config and the applications you want to run, test on your laptop, build in Ci and then deploy to cloud or bare metal, with just your service (or Docker/K8S for dynamic services).
but really this whole business of writing chef recipes and provisioning harnesses is really the same kind stuff. it seems important because you can't run without it, and thats what your whole day is...but really its pretty secondary to what you're actually trying to accomplish (run a service)
its interesting to think about what that world might look like...someone is going to make something like that stick at some point. so...why are people provisioning their own containers/vms instead of using the higher level services right now?