Really the issue is swapability. The way the system is constructed, there's basically one monolith for customer-facing services and another for internal ops, and some smaller shared databases, services and a bunch of backup. This hews to the company's security profile, and the lack of scattered microservices (which I now consider fortunate) is also a result of that years-ago migration from dedicated servers where these two interconnected systems evolved along separate trajectories [edit: to the point where the customer facing system still only writes to its own mark/sweep DB that's picked up by the internal system, or in rare cases accesses internal APIs by cUrl ... so either could still be anywhere]. Going up a tier on one or both of those monoliths would be more difficult and costly if they're reserved. So in a sense, a long reservation would just be good insurance against the business not growing. But no one wants to pull the trigger on that.