Aluminium designed in as heat sink perhaps? But not sure if this is so relevant in an actively cooled DC setting as passive buried under cables at a home workspace!
We were a little team, doing the API dev, the infra, the hardware and countless things.
The product is improving and it was impossible to even imagine remoing the case as we spent so many time wiring everything, going to DC and setting up everything.
Yes the team is actually doing all of this, even going to DC installing the macs in the racks.
But I agree that for a big scale, this is a good solution. (cf: github)
Agree, removing the case is a lot of effort. Github does a lot of fancy things but you might want to consider how much they're charging by the minute as well
Our way is quite efficient & we're able to quickly adapt to new HW gens
