For small scale, managed services just makes too much sense. I can have a database with automatic backups, security patching, and failover to another region, wi

For small scale, managed services just makes too much sense. I can have a database with automatic backups, security patching, and failover to another region, within seconds in a click of a button. For less than $1/hr. If you know a sysadmin that can do better for cheaper I'm all ears. The ability to scale to Fortune 100 scale with another click of a button is just a cherry on top. SLAs are nice PR finger pointing tools. No one cares about the pennies you get back. We broke our SLA because Google broke their SLA is a good enough excuse for most of your clients most of the time. Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM still applies. Also, once you're massive sized, at least AWS (though I'm sure GCP/Azure too) seems more than happy to negotiate below their listed pricing, especially for hardware. Security and lock-in are definitely real concerns when considering cloud providers. But let's not pretend cloud providers aren't competitive on price and convenience.