[toddgardner]

Yea totally. this is a balance.

Very few times should you manage the actual hardware yourself.

But often a cloud is overly complex for what you need. 10 years ago we left MS Azure and started leasing dedicated hardware in OVH. Our costs were cut by 90%, our performance tripled, and our reliability improved. We did have to take on some effort to make our systems portable with ansible and containers, but we greatly simplified our vendor stack.

I am never confused why something goes down, and I have confidence that I can stand up with another vendor without re-writing anything.

If I can't own it, it should be as simple and commoditized as possible. Most clouds are not that.