It would be easy to oversell the benefits of standardization, and they are certainly a requirement for automation to be effective. However, like anything, it can be taken too far. There is no point, for example, building servers on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 in 2019 simply because this was once defined as a standard (it is now End of Life and no longer supported or updated). Similarly, from time to time, software vendors will have qualified their product on certain specific Linux distributions or application stacks and will not provide support unless their software is run within that ecosystem.
These are cases when deviations from the SOE are necessary, but they should be performed in a controlled manner. For example, if a business has built up its Linux server estate on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, and then a new software stack is purchased...
