[peanut-walrus]

It makes sense to think about price in the context of your business. If your entire infra cost is a rounding error on your balance sheet, of course you would pick the provider with the best features and availability guarantees (choose IBM/AWS). If your infra cost makes up a significant percentage of your operating expenses, you will start spending engineering effort to lower the cost.

That's why AWS can get away with charging the prices they do, even though it is expensive, for most companies it is not expensive enough to make it worth their while to look for cheaper alternatives.

[oersted]

It’s often less about engineering effort and more about taking some small risks to try less mainstream (but still relatively mature) alternatives by reasoning from first principles and doing a bit of homework.

From our experience, you can actually end up in a situation that requires less engineering effort and be more stable, while saving on costs, if you dare to go to a bit lower abstraction layers. Sometimes being closer to the metal is simpler, not more complex. And in practice complexity is much more often the cause of outages rather than hardware reliability.