I don't think that's what he's implying. He means I think that the cloud providers are not very friendly to devs who will take the time to customize their RDBMS

I don't think that's what he's implying. He means I think that the cloud providers are not very friendly to devs who will take the time to customize their RDBMS to squeeze more performance out instead of switching over to a more expensive solution capable of handling the kind of high volume OLAP he had to deal with.