It sounds like we're using different definitions of the word "self-hosted." If you have your own on-premises lab or colo rental, you're not using AWS/GCP/Hetzne

It sounds like we're using different definitions of the word "self-hosted." If you have your own on-premises lab or colo rental, you're not using AWS/GCP/Hetzner/DO, and you've got a lot of undifferentiated heavy lifting before your NixOps kick in (including maintenance going forward). If your point is that you can avoid a serverless architecture, still use cloud, and still use infra as code: of course you can. We've got to be disagreeing on what "self-hosted" means. OP criticized the cost and complexity of deploying EC2 instances and RDS databases across AZs, so presumably infra-as-code wouldn't help him here. OP didn't present an alternative solution, but reading between the lines is to not use cloud infrastructure (e.g. on-prem or colo).