I have worked on reliability for some private OpenStack deployments, on-prep K8S deployments. Views are my own and don’t reflect on any open source community or

I have worked on reliability for some private OpenStack deployments, on-prep K8S deployments. Views are my own and don’t reflect on any open source community or company. To operate a production cloud you need expertise at all parts of the stack. This includes network, kernel, maybe firmware, orchestration, etc. You also need adequate planning where your on-prem data center teams continuously upgrade your hardware/firmware and add capacity. From an organizational perspective this is an entire VP or SVP level organization depending on where you are. Operating large infrastructure is hard. If it’s not your core competency there is really no point in dealing with it. Either way, it takes enormous effort to hire and keep a team skilled to operate infrastructure. You will lose your team to big-tech eventually. You don’t need external consultants to manage your cloud infrastructure. Your existing engineers can skill up to use it. Public cloud will commoditize what typically takes a lot of time to plan for capacity, DNS, networking, scaling, etc. In short - its prioritizing speed of execution over everything else. The opaque billing is just cost of doing business. But unless tech is your core competency, opaque billing is much easier to deal with than all the other situations that come up with managing and maintaining your own infrastructure.