[asdkhadsj]

I think there's a miscommunication here, but I probably should have said SaaS rather than "cloud".

Ie, I don't advocate self managing hardware. That's a difficult problem, one more cheaply and easily solved by using AWS, GC, etc. Yet, there are dozens of SaaS options for so many little problem you could have, and they can bleed you dry. A balance is needed.

I mentioned in my original post that I advocated self hosting except for VMs. Ie, I promote usage of AWS/etc. I just don't think we can afford Papertrail, and the billion other SaaS pieces I used in my last company. Self hosting has been far more scalable and cheap, due to our modest needs.

[jrumbut]

In the most successful of the companies of the sort you've been describing that I've been around SaaS was kept pretty minimal. This was less a policy than a consequence of just having *nix skills or a desire to learn. Also many SaaSes have relatively serviceable self-hosted FOSS counterparts.

Log management in particular is really a shell script/self hosted app kind of task, just share the money saved on Papertrail with the team and I'm sure they'll get on board.