It started with the D drive.
Remember? Games on D, documents on D. C drive - for the system, format it every six months. A colleague of mine went further: configured Windows once, took a disk image, and after formatting just restored it. Not reinstalling - restoring.
That was twenty years ago. We call it “containers” now.
Same idea: data separate from executables. Except now the OS itself became the “executables”. Spin up a new image - everything works.
So why are you still running do-release-upgrade on k8s nodes?
Drain the node. Flash a new image. Bring it back. That’s not an upgrade - it’s a replacement. Much cleaner.
Not the process — the result.