I think "use a managed service until that starts to suck" is often not a bad heuristic - with a bit of luck by the time (if ever) it does start to suck you'll b

I think "use a managed service until that starts to suck" is often not a bad heuristic - with a bit of luck by the time (if ever) it does start to suck you'll be familiar enough with the system that spinning up your own cluster will involve significantly less "learning the hard way" than it would've done had you done it first off. And I say this as somebody who really really dislikes managed services from a "but I want to have total control" point of view (this is not entirely rational on my part but true of me nonetheless.)