[milesvp]

My experience with cloud migrations was that you could migrate and forget about it. This was for a high traffic metro newspaper, that was easy to cache for external users but needed to handle a large newsroom using wordpress to manage the content (wordpress can be a huge resource hog).

The main costs in terms of labor end up being making sure that backends services are updated. Same pain you’d feel in a colo, except you cloud provider may force an upgrade you’d otherwise wish to put off. Now I intentionally kept most things at the VM level of abstraction, because it was clear that the added complexity of something like Kuberetes wasn’t worth any savings you might get by needing one less server, and I had enough granularity of healthchecks to just automatically spin down any server that was causing problem and let autoscaling work it’s magic. This was also 10 years ago, some choices might make less sense today, YMMV.

Also, don’t think I’m saying all those people aren’t necessary based on the current needs of the business. I just knew I was in a very constrained environment and prioritized anything that allowed for the constant shrinking headcount my department was facing.