[cntainer]

I'm not an "on-premise bare-metal server absolutist". Of course there are trade offs in terms of convenience but there are also trade offs in terms of cost and performance and vendor lock-in. It all depends on what you need and what are your specific constraints.

Is time to market critical? Will you have daily traffic fluctuation between 10 to 10k users? Will you lose a ton of money/customers for any service interruption? By all means use the latest version of managed kubernetes combined with whatever other cloud service tickles those itches. But don't forget to always keep an eye on your bills and think how can you reduce them by simplifying your architecture.

But if you're just building a corporate intranet for a few dozen users who log in once a week I'm pretty sure a simple VM (even if managed in AWS) would make much more sense.

And if you really want to roll your own there are plenty of options to make your life much easier compared to sending a rocket into outer-space. Yes it's more work upfront but after you do the setup the first time there's little to do.

infra automation & templates: - ansible, docker, etc

log storage: - mount shared storage - ELK - use a paid LaaS or monitoring SaaS

certificate management (on LB machine only): - certbot

access controls: - linux user and groups management

patch management: - enable unattanded upgrades for security patches

health monitoring: - in terms of lb nginx has that built in. - for more advanced use cases use a paid service (new relic) or a free one (nagios)

remote administration: - ansible, etc.

Don't get me wrong I use cloud on a daily basis for work, I'm just sad because most teams don't know how to use it effectively without jumping the gun.