Owning physical hardware is a fad. I rent big iron mainframes from IBM and pay their consulting fees to punch new cards every time I want to modify a program.
Wondering if things will swing back to physical hardware with new chips like the amd epyc rome... 64 core ridiculous i/o on a single chip. that, compounded with the fact that people seem to be gravitating back towards compiled and higher performance languages. could run a medium traffic site on one machine. hello mainframe era 2.0
Depends on your use case. VMs give you more flexibility and a reasonable level of isolation that is needed in some scenarios.
Agreed. At this point HN could have a post about the merits of plain old dedicated servers and it would seem novel.
Just wait. In ten more years IBM and Deloitte will re-brand fat clients and on-prem infrastructure as something else and they'll start selling it to everyone. Replace "mainframe" and "dumb terminal" with "the cloud" and "web app" and we had this same conversation 40 years ago. Then in another 20 years we'll swing back to some version of consolidated+remote servers and lightweight client access portals.