Taking code review away, because we all know we're not going to sit around waiting for a review while a patch needs to go out urgently, if your build, test, and deploy pipelines take three hours then you have some serious problems that you need to address, and containers aren't it.

There are methods for handling hotfixes/patches to production quickly that work well in high volume sales website setups.

I worked at a trading firm where you could add a zero to that cost for a 3-hour outage, and I can tell you that the one thing we would absolutely never skimp on was code review. Because the cost of a bad "fix" that actually makes things worse has the potential to be greater still, and because humans are most likely to make silly mistakes when they're working under intense pressure.

What we would do instead is slightly intensify the code review process by pair programming the hotfix, and ensuring that a third developer who was familiar with the system in question was standing by to follow up with an immediate review.

We will even sometimes keep the video call open until deployment is done and production validation is complete - the devops guys get the information they need, someone else is keeping an eye on the checklist and calling out items if necessary, etc.

I have app stacks that deploy a dozen containers over an hour because the orchestration takes time: signal the old containers to drain, pause for an app with a very long initialization time to settle, gradually roll traffic to the new one to let caches warm, and then repeat.

In both of these cases, deployment is a function of the application. There's nothing infrastructural that puts a time floor on things.

That's an easier solve with docker containers. And testing, including UI testing, can be integrated much more easily with ci/CD tools and docker containers that have code which goes by commit hashes and which ensure every package down to the version is controlled across environments.

And the impact of all of these on direct revenue/productivity can be immense. SSH into prod is a crutch.

There are other costs from outages which occur infrequently but are highly costly because developers/support are manually touching the servers.

The cost really should be analysed as what is the median cost on revenue (or profit) as a percentage point. One off pricing is pretty meaningless.