ashinclouds

This is definitely truth to this. Running your own infrastructure is not popular, much less "flashy". It is capital intensive. Some businesses explicitly avoid capital investment worsened by some localities having "fun" tax/accounting rules for capital assets. At some point, using an external service provider is a better tradeoff for the business decisions. The other major aspect is few basically run small scale infrastructure like people once did even just a decade ago, so the base knowledge and opportunity to learn is not what it once was, which is an overall technology industry conundrum.

So, CERN doesn't run that many machines. They do have that many cores across their OpenStack fleet. I actually think it is even more than that now since they've tweeted graphs[1] from adding 800+ new physical nodes to their clusters. Anyway, it is not all about CERN, but they are an active community contributor. They are an operator who speaks publicly of their work, challenges, and successes. They have championed fixing some issues they have encountered at their scale, and provided feedback to the various projects on aspects which would help them solve their infrastructure automation issues. The same has occurred with the telecoms and other verticals with specific needs that cannot use public clouds.

As for docs, they vary from project to project, but one aspect I've encountered as a frustration and heard large scale operators echo, is that often search index results seem to favor some older specific release as opposed to the latest release, which creates a lot of confusion if your not aware of it and don't see the warning on the rendered webpage. Some other popular open source projects have encountered the same exact challenge, and it is a hard need to balance.

[1] https://twitter.com/ArneWiebalck/status/1478778715005984772