(for those not on the same page, I’m talking from a position of substantial experience with all 3 major clouds)

Plus, these days the maintenance burden of the OS layer is really heavily overstated. With certain self-updating open-source container OSes one doesn’t even really have to think about patches and all that ancient crap.

The real appeal of the big players in my mind is only in one use case - scale. If you need 10k servers for heavy “big” data processing like in genomics or ‘AI’ (whatever that means), only then they start to be indisposable. Otherwise, the considerable burden of training all personnel on proprietary APIs is just not worth it - it literally costs less to buy and configure your own system (or a traditional VPS or dedicated server). Cloud architects ain’t cheap!

There is always the hidden cost of not spending time on activities that are core to your business (if this is indeed for a business) that would make multiples of the money CF costs you.