[crote]

- Keep it simple. Cloud providers offer hundreds of services - just because you can use them doesn't mean you should. A simple Docker container or a small VM might already be enough for you, and it's a lot less moving parts.

- Document everything. Hacking together some cloud infra is easy, maintaining it is a completely different story. You want to have clear and up-to-date documentation on what exactly you have running and why. If you don't have good docs, it'll be impossible to scale, refactor, or solve outages.

- Make sure people are trained. Cloud infra management gets complicated real fast. You want people to actually know what they are doing (no "hey, why is the bucket public" oopsies), and you want to avoid running into Bus Factor issues. Not everyone needs to be an expert, but you should always have one go-to person for questions who's actually capable, and one backup in case something happens to them.

- Watch your bills. Every individual part isn't too expensive, but it all adds up quickly. Make sure you do a sanity check every once in a while (no, $5k / month for a DB storing megabytes is not normal). Don't use scaling as a "magic fix-everything button" - sometimes your code just sucks.