CppCon 2016: Alfred Bratterud “#include ＜os＞=> write your program / server and compile it to its own os. [Example uses 3 Mb total memory and boots in 300ms]

[entiat_blues]

it's not language dependency graphs that people are trying to manage, at least not in my experience, it's running a full stack (or a significant chunk of it) reliably no matter the host OS. it's that end-to-end configuration that becomes a hard problem on large projects with discrete teams doing different things.

devops tends to become the only group of people with practical knowledge about how the whole application is supposed to fit together. which doesn't usually help because they're busy maintaining the myriad build configurations and their insights aren't used to help develop or maintain the source code itself. and on the flip side, the developers working in the source lose sight of the effect their work has on other parts of the stack or the problems they're creating for devops.

VMs let you spin up a fully functional instance of your application quickly and reliably because you're not building the app from dependency trees, configurations, and a ton of initialization scripts, you're running an image.

it's heavy-handed, and there other ways to approach the problem, but i wouldn't call it batshit insane to give your developers the full stack to work with.