Right now at work I’m suffering from a QA environment that has been around too long. It runs out of space sometimes, rabbit gets hiccupy. Elasticsearch mappings are bad; we’ve updated the creation scripts, but these boxes have been provisioned since before then.
If we regularly discarded our QA environments and spun up new ones, then they’d be more predictable. Instead each one is a special snowflake, full of special surprises.
Now that we have VMs, environments should be like people: mortal. Our bodies don’t restore themselves perfectly. Joints wear out, scars appear, junk accumulates in the back of our eye sockets. None of this holds the species back, because from a distance, individual humans aren’t that special. The circle of life takes us, and we are renewed.
If only my QA environments worked the same way, because this one has arthritis and the Alzheimer’s can’t be far away.