I mean, “fleet” semantics aside, surely $150,000 of servers is enough for at least one full-time person to be maintaining them. The point is that there are absolutely maintenance and ops costs associated with these servers.
There's maintenance cost to everything that runs a userland.
What we're missing is tracking what time is spent managing hardware and firmware, (or even network config, if we're being generous) and how much time is being spent on OS config.
From personal experience (as a sysadmin before it was entirely unsexy as a term) the overwhelming majority of my ops work was done in userland on the machine, maybe something like 96-97% of my tasks were nothing to do with hardware at all.
Since I got rebranded as SRE, the tools and the pay sure did get a lot better in the time, but the job is largely similar and ultimately running in VMs does make deployment faster, but once deployed I find the maintenance burden to be the same (or perhaps a little more) as things seem to become deprecated or require changes from our cloud vendor a bit more often.
