The new office has desks, chairs, and Wi-Fi

The company opens a Lisbon office in March. The old playbook: a server closet, a firewall appliance, a site-to-site VPN, a week of IT on a plane.

The new playbook is a marketplace query. GET /api/v1/servers/available?country=PT lists in-stock bare metal nearby. IT rents one into a Lisbon pool, copies the standard workstation template once per hire, and emails URLs. Staff sit down on day one with whatever laptop HR shipped them, open the display URL, and they're at their desk. The terminal URL is there for the engineers. Nothing is installed on the premises, nothing is installed on the laptops, and the office network is a consumer-grade router.

Per-office infrastructure went from a capital project to one rental line, and opening the next office is the same query with a different country code.