alt Hacker NewsMost tools, frameworks and articles in IT, SaaS in particular, are about spinning up things. It is what people find exciting.
Work a few years in Ops and you learn that spinning up things is not a big part of your work. It's maintenance, such as deleting stuff.
Unfortunately this process is the hardest, and there's very little to help you do it right. Many tools, framework and vendors don't even have proper support for it.
Some even recommend 'rinse and repeat' instead of adjusting what you have - and this method is not great if you value uptime, nor if you have state that you want to preserve, such as customer data :-)
Deleting stuff, shutting services down, turning off servers - those are hard tasks in IT.
My acid test for provisioning automation products is asking: Can it rename deployed resources?
Practically none can, even in market segments where this is highly relevant. For example: user identity and access management products. Women get married and change their name all the time!
The next level up is the ability to rename a container such as an organisational unit or a security group.
Then, products that can rearrange a hierarchy to accommodate a merger, split, or a new layer of management. This obviously needs to preserve the data. “Immutable infrastructure” where everything is recreated from scratch and the original is dropped is cheating.
I’ve only ever seen one such provisioning tool, the rest don’t even begin to approach this level of capability.