BTW you can of course self-host k8s, or dokku, or whatnot, and have as easy a deployment story as with the cloud. (But not necessarily as easy a maintenance story for the whole thing.)
That's my whole point. Zero maintenance.
For a tinkerer who's focused on the infra, then sure, hosting your own can make sense. But for anyone who's focused on literally anything else, it doesn't make any sense.
Are you really going to trust Claude Code to recover in that situation? Do you think it will? I've had DB primaries fail on managed DBs like AWS RDS and Google Cloud SQL, and recovery is generally automatic within minutes. You don't have to lift a finger.
Same goes for something like a managed k8s cluster, like EKS or GKE. There's a big difference between using a fully-managed service and trying to replicate a fully managed system on your own with the help of an LLM.
Of course it does boil down to what you need. But if you need reliability and don't want to have to deal with admin, managed services can make life much simpler. There's a whole class of problems I simply never have to think about.
I kind of assume that goes without saying, but you're right.
The company I'm with does model training on cloud GPUs, but it has funding for that.
> RDS + EKS for a couple hundred a month is an amazing deal for what is essentially zero maintenance application hosting.
Right. That's my point, and aside from GPU, pretty much any normal service or app you need to run can be deployed on that.
This is such an imaginary problem. The examples like this you hear about are inevitably the outliers who didn't pay any attention to this issue until they were forced to.
For most services, it's incredibly easy to constrain your costs anyway. You do have to pay attention to the pricing model of the services you use, though - if a DDOS is going to generate a big cost for you, you probably made a bad choice somewhere.
> You really can't think of _one_ case where self hosting makes any sense?
Only if it's something you're interested in doing, or if you're so big you can hire a team to deal with that. Otherwise, why would you waste time on it?
... or for a big company. I've worked at companies with thousands of developers, and it's all been 'self hosted'. In DCs, so not rinky dink, but yes, and there's a lot of advantages to doing it this way. If you set it up right, it can be much easier for developers to use than AWS.
