We have photographs of engineers doing by hand, for nine years, the jobs a control plane now does: network boot, on-site backup, remote access built out of Raspberry Pis, a hundred laptops in a fortnight. The pattern in those photographs is the whole argument.
Replace rather than modify. The idea is sound, and the benefit comes almost entirely from a social commitment rather than from any tool you can buy.
We have rebuilt the same platform layer for every client we have ever taken on. This year we stopped. Andromeda is the internal name for the component framework underneath, and the name is an argument about scale: the structure that holds a hundred machines together has to be the one that holds four.
