If anything, I hope we’ve learned that node uptimes are unimportant. It used to be a badge of honor to show some system hadn’t been rebooted in $years. Now that just implies that there’s unpatched vulnerabilities and countless hand-made configuration changes that nobody remembers and that will be lost if the machine dies.

A sign of a responsible organization these days is how short-lived their hosts are. If every machine in an organization has an uptime less than a week, I feel pretty confident in that org’s ability to recover from a disaster. I also know it’s harder for attackers to keep a foothold once in the system, since everything is being constantly updated and reimaged.