In my experience, having done it both ways, first on VM's, then on lots of fully or mostly managed services, I generally prefer the latter because systems tend

In my experience, having done it both ways, first on VM's, then on lots of fully or mostly managed services, I generally prefer the latter because systems tend to be a lot more "self-healing" - because they're someone elses responsibility. This has had a dramatic effect on improving my sanity and sleeping well at night. I only wish I could migrate to an even more fully managed stack that's more reliable and still less work. The cases where I haven't been able to are either too expensive or would be too difficult to migrate.