> I feel like learning how to configure bird, bind, haproxy, rdbms clusters, redundant MXs, etc. has taught me far more than spinning up equivalent virtual infr

> I feel like learning how to configure bird, bind, haproxy, rdbms clusters, redundant MXs, etc. has taught me far more than spinning up equivalent virtual infrastructure on a public cloud would have. I agree with this, but the choice of what other individuals play with is not ours to make. There's still countless of youngsters working on bare metal, for whatever it's worth, they just grow up in a world with a lot of existing abstractions now. > Assuming we're talking about side-projects/hobbyist development: when I'm doing that I want as few variable expenses as possible, and they usually don't require the purported benefits of the cloud. If such a project needs to scale: I'll bolt it onto a cloud at that point, or sprinkle in specific services to address the pain points. 100%, but the choice is free for anyone themselves to make. OP is furthering his knowledge and experience in a very specialised and highly sought after sector. Maybe he'll come to the same conclusion at some point, or maybe he comes from bare metal and has different perspectives now and thinks that redundancy is always awesome.