Back in 2012–2013, I found myself intrigued by the notion of treating infrastructure as code—not just configuration, but entire machine lifecycles. Tools like Vagrant and Packer started gaining traction, pushing us toward the idea of immutable infrastructure.
The philosophy was simple: instead of patching live systems, just replace them. While I didn't have the luxury to go fully immutable at the time, the approach inspired many of the deployment pipelines and rollback strategies I later implemented in production.
This shift helped me rethink server management as a disposability problem, not a stability problem. A subtle but powerful mindset change.