There's a bit of conflation between easy and simple here. Cloud is easy-ish, but it's not simple due to the proprietary abstractions you aren't meant to access.

There's a bit of conflation between easy and simple here. Cloud is easy-ish, but it's not simple due to the proprietary abstractions you aren't meant to access. If things go wrong, you can't investigate past a certain point. Granted, clouds go to great lengths to make their own failures auto-handled for you, but that actually increases complexity in order to remain easy. Running your own machine is definitely simpler because you can debug a problem all the way down to bare metal. Not easier, but simpler. That said, the more I do this stuff, the more I want simple, not easy. Easy is good when you're on the happy path, but as soon as something goes wrong, you wish it was simple instead. In an ideal world, all the guts are exposed, but in the clearest, most organized way possible, where you always have an option to go one level deeper if you want. This would be great to have in both software interfaces and software design (code).