[gwbas1c]

> if your core business function depends on some capability, you should own it

I fear this is easy to misconstrue.

For example, I was at a company that, as I learned how everything worked, realized that we were spending $20k / month for cloud services to basically process about as much real-time data as a CD player processes.

I joked that we should be able to run our entire product on a single server running in the office. (Then I pointed out that this was a joke and that running in the cloud gave us amazing redundancy that we didn't have to implement ourselves.) My point was to show that our architecture was massively bloated and overengineered for what we were doing. (IE, the cost of serialization to send messages was more than the actual processing that was happening. The cost was both money, and the fact that we were spending more time working on messaging than the actual product.)

BUT: There's many times where we could easily say, "this would be so much easier if we had our own server in the office." And, if we misconstrue the above quote, we could convince ourselves to run our own server in the office.

[toddgardner]

Yea totally. this is a balance.

Very few times should you manage the actual hardware yourself.

But often a cloud is overly complex for what you need. 10 years ago we left MS Azure and started leasing dedicated hardware in OVH. Our costs were cut by 90%, our performance tripled, and our reliability improved. We did have to take on some effort to make our systems portable with ansible and containers, but we greatly simplified our vendor stack.

I am never confused why something goes down, and I have confidence that I can stand up with another vendor without re-writing anything.

If I can't own it, it should be as simple and commoditized as possible. Most clouds are not that.