Thank you for sharing this, it helps clear up the concern you had a lot. I deal with some big German clients fairly frequently and one of the requirements is

Thank you for sharing this, it helps clear up the concern you had a lot. I deal with some big German clients fairly frequently and one of the requirements is "[they] own the entire stack top to bottom, back to front." A lot of dark site operations I work on also share a similar requirement, so really it's why I'm far more open and comfortable with an all on premises situation since I see the scaling done without any public cloud. From what I do work with on public cloud sure, I absolutely get why it is so easy to scale if you don't already have a good team to build and orchestrate a local set up. I also see some big name companies I contract with just throw money onto a fire fueled by Azure, and while the expenditure hurts sure, it's still considered acceptable. I guess I probed because I see a lot of different sides of modern architecture and aside from a well documented and disciplined one, I'm not sure there's a right thing with modern architecture, just different comfort zones with different efficiencies.