100% this. Cloud vendor lock-in is absolutely a relevant factor for consideration -- especially when the non-cloud alternatives are ~10x cheaper. At my company

100% this. Cloud vendor lock-in is absolutely a relevant factor for consideration -- especially when the non-cloud alternatives are ~10x cheaper. At my company we made the decision to stick primarily with managed dedicated servers over AWS in our very early days. Now we're a decent size a few years later (25 employees) and the cost savings we're realizing are tremendous. We did the math and found that if we had gone with AWS in the early days then we would now conservatively be paying an extra $165,000 on our hosting bill annually. We still use AWS for some specialized services (e.g., Lex) but the bulk of our stack runs on gear that we now colocate for a fraction of the cost.