[tajd]

Life is easy when you don't want to think about scale or security. Until you have to, that is.

[Spivak]

Yeah the author is broadly talking about the difference between IaaS vs PaaS where in the latter the vendor is also your DevOps team. The cost being a more opinionated setup you have less control over.

A trade worth making oftentimes but it doesn't make the complexity go away.