As an actual startup founder who started as a 1 man startup, strongly disagree.
Spent maybe $200 a month on Google Cloud, got an actual production ready cluster. Scaled up to Millions in revenue, never had to deal with any Linux Server admin BS.
More time on business, less time on Linux Sysadmin.
Oh, you just had to deal with a different flavor of BS. Or you was lucky and everything just worked out for you (but why Google Cloud and not some PaaS like Heroku, so you don't have to deal with cloud infrastructure/servers BS altogether?)
I've been both a system administrator, managing GNU/Linux and FreeBSD servers in the ancient ages, and DevOps guy doing all sort of stuff in the clouds. The complexity is still there, it hadn't disappeared in some magic cloud pixie dust, even though sales would wanna tell you that fairy tale. But here's the thing - you never get to dive into those waters (or hire someone to do it for you, be it an employee, contractor or paid support) unless shit hits the fan and forces you to.
You must've cheerfully walked through a minefield and haven't stepped on and even seen any mines. Honestly, I'm happy it worked that way. And hopefully, this minefield is sparse enough those days so you're a rule not an exception - I don't have meaningful statistics. It would be actually interesting to run a poll or something. I just happen to have seen a few companies/people for whom clouds weren't all unicorns and rainbows.
And as for the flavors - it just happened that you knew how to set up stuff in Google Cloud. Would you happened to know how to spin a simple instance on Digital Ocean instead and went that way, and be lucky to not encounter any serious issues, it would've been the same painless experience, just different flavor.
The big cloud providers have a variety of offerings of different complexity. Using GCP as an example: want k8s with all it's flexibility and complexity? You have GKE. Want to still run containers, but abstract away all the cluster resource management? CloudRun. Abstract away the container itself? CloudFunctions. AWS has EKS, ElasticBeanstalk, etc.
I understand people get overwhelmed the first time they're dropped into the console of these cloud providers but really it just takes a bit of reading to figure out what you should/shouldn't care about. And the benefit of doing so is enormous.
Privately I host nearly everything on a shared host in Germany (that is everything I can host without sudo) [1].
For company policy reasons I must absolutely use AWS or GCE.
For an internal project I need to setup Matomo. Something I did thrice in the last few month on [1].
OK login through SSO into AWS. Look around, ask Google, find the bitnami image, click few buttons. Done. OH shit. Now I need to somehow make it publicly available. OK. Google again. Ah this is the way. Few hours of reading and clicking later I have a publicly reachable Matomo instance. Oh hey. It warms me that it is not ssl encrypted. OK. How to do let's encrypt? Google again with my second batch of coffee (or was it the third). Found an easy way, just enter a command in the shell. Oh hey, how do I get my ssh pub key into my EC2 instance?
Damn the day is nearly gone and I have yet to deliver this tangential asset to an internal project while killing my CCI (how much I am booked on client work) for something that the first time took me 30 minutes with the great documentation from [1].
To me as a meager Data Analyst the complexity of cloud offerings is a nightmare. And the documentation is written for other echelons of tech understanding most of the time.
[1] uberspace.de
Managed K8s. Openstack.
When we started paying for it, it was still cheaper than AWS.
Just because AWS is the default, does not mean you should use it.
Disaster recovery planning is practice we should all adhere to. Hindsight is 20/20. Not trying to be a smartass. I know it was painful for a lot of folks.
At the same time, unless you paid for managed service with clear SLAs, then responsibility is yours.
Cloud is just someone else's computer.
FYI: we started with OVH before the fire
Still prefer Google, as they are the OG for k8s.
Today circumstances have changed. You need hassle free scalable DB, then AWS RDS might you best choice. Maybe.
You need open standard IaaS, well, there is ton of options.
Even before K8S, you had and option of Openstack with Ansible. Yes, very different beast, but still much _simpler_ and _cheaper_ than stocking on large number of IT professionals.
We might spend more time messing around with AWS than our colocated servers.
Whichever one let me pay rent at the end of the month
Might I ask you what kind of product your 1 man startup have?
Pros and cons to being in a crowded market.
From day 1, you KNOW there is demand for your product. You can look up Channel Advisor and see the revenue. And 20 smaller companies under fighting for the rest.
Cons of course being, you have to figue out how to compete with all of these guys ;)
