I remember driving to the datacenter to setup my own servers. I had a fractional T1 to my desk, it provided a blazing 640k (sometimes all the way up to an unfathomable 1MB!!1!) of bandwidth and only cost around $1,300 a month. Good times.
That gave way to hosting providers, like ServerBeach and Rackspace, where you paid them to setup the server hardware for you, saving the drive. You still had to deal with bandwidth, backup, redundancy, etc. Much easier than before but still a pretty big hassle.
Then the cloud happened. "Come to the cloud, where everything just magically happens for you," the salesperson said. So I went. And discovered that none of my scripts, tools or knowledge worked there, and had to completely start over from scratch. FOR EACH VENDOR. Gah.
The ONE thing I will grant cloud providers is that I can usually automate my way around their enshittification. They over-complicate things to an extreme where I do wonder if there is an actual savings or not, just based on the headaches their setups can consistently produce.
My take is that your needs pretty much determine which route is more/less painful. Sometimes you DO need the redundancy and uptime enough to tolerate the shenanigans of the vendor, and other times you just need your own machine to quietly get things done (without worrying about SLAs or client expectations).
The ultimate question you should be asking, and there is no right/wrong answer: For this particular effort, is it more valuable to you to learn how to do these things by hand, or is the infrastructure just a means to an end so you can do something specific?
Yeah agreed, there are pros and cons but ultimately we are exchanging control for convenience.
The idea of a hosting provider that manages all the boilerplate, security updates etc is not a bad thing. The idea of being able to spin up another node, have load balancing etc just work and you didn't even have to get out of bed - is also not a bad thing.
Where it becomes suspicious is when Amazon and Google both have their 'own' databases, which are just different enough to make it a pain. And yes I know I can spin up e.g. a Postgres instance on Google or AWS for not much money, but now I have a vendor-specific provisioning script. "Just use Terraform or Pulumi" - even when an LLM manages this web of corporate enterprise nonsense it's still unmanageable and everyone just ends up with a run book of prayers.
That gave way to hosting providers, like ServerBeach and Rackspace, where you paid them to setup the server hardware for you, saving the drive. You still had to deal with bandwidth, backup, redundancy, etc. Much easier than before but still a pretty big hassle.
Then the cloud happened. "Come to the cloud, where everything just magically happens for you," the salesperson said. So I went. And discovered that none of my scripts, tools or knowledge worked there, and had to completely start over from scratch. FOR EACH VENDOR. Gah.
The ONE thing I will grant cloud providers is that I can usually automate my way around their enshittification. They over-complicate things to an extreme where I do wonder if there is an actual savings or not, just based on the headaches their setups can consistently produce.
My take is that your needs pretty much determine which route is more/less painful. Sometimes you DO need the redundancy and uptime enough to tolerate the shenanigans of the vendor, and other times you just need your own machine to quietly get things done (without worrying about SLAs or client expectations).
The ultimate question you should be asking, and there is no right/wrong answer: For this particular effort, is it more valuable to you to learn how to do these things by hand, or is the infrastructure just a means to an end so you can do something specific?