It used to take months to travel across the U.S. Or any sizable landmass for that matter. One of the few really well documented wagon trains took four months to travel from Iowa to Montana… A trip that takes an airplane about four hours today. And that airplane trip is a ton safer too. That’s the power of automation, and recent advances in IT have enabled a similar curve of improvement in deployment times.
The days of weeks or months to spinning up new applications are long past. We’re all living it, so we know that Lines of Business expect servers to come available in a timeline that even a few years ago was not considered feasible in most IT shops. And generally speaking, that’s a good thing. The fact is that first virtualization, and then cloud sped the provisioning process, meaning IT had the ability to actually spin up entire systems faster.