[ThinkBeat]

A crucial point is to ensure that you give yourself the ability to move from your cloud providers to on prem, and / or to a different cloud.

A bad example: If you are with provide X and they change pricing structure and it impacts you 3 times the cost, you can move it without too much hassle.

Once you embrace all the proprietary and fancy features that your cloud provider has, then you are stuck and moving will be a nightmare.

compute/s3 are easy to move. k8s should be easy to move but I have not tried it myself. Database hosting is easy to change as long as you are using an independent product, not a custom database your cloud provider has.

It is much more difficult when you have AWS/Azure pipelines, AWS/Azure Geo location/manipulation AWS/Azure proprietary scaling etc etc

Terraform is supposed to help here but in my experience with TF consultants it is not at all straightforward not compatible with a lot of AWS/Azure offerings.

Then you are stuck and moving will be difficult and expensive. Which of course is the business plan for the cloud providers.