[rkangel]

Disclaimer: not a backend or web engineer, I mostly write embedded software, but inevitably need to implement services from time to time (and had a startup at one point)

My response is "yes but what about databases". There are any number of ways of hosting my application - "put it on a VM" is a perfectly reasonable approach, particularly as my preferred platform is Elixir which is pretty monolithic anyway. That's fine for the app, but what about the DB? I think I know just enough to know that hosting Postgres properly (i.e. reliably and performantly with appropriate backups) is not that easy, and I'd like someone else to do it for me.

For my startup I used App Engine (Flexible Environment) and Cloud SQL. That worked well in that I had the "two instances behind a load balancer" that you want for seamless upgrade, and managed SQL without having to delve into all the many Google Cloud services for networking etc. etc. Everything else was just 'more elixir' which is easy to test locally.