It depends. I personally love cloud based solutions because they save me lots of time. But I'm highly selective in what I use and there are some solutions that

It depends. I personally love cloud based solutions because they save me lots of time. But I'm highly selective in what I use and there are some solutions that are clearly counter productive because they are too complicated. I run a small, bootstrapped startup. We don't have enough money to pay ourselves and I make a living doing consulting on the side. Being budget and time constrained like that I have to be highly selective in what I use. So, I love things like Google cloud. Our GCP bills are very modest. A few hundred euros per month. I would move to a cheaper provider except I can't really justify the time investment. And I do like Google's UI and tools relative to AWS, which I've used in the past. I have no use for Kubernetes. Running an empty cluster would be more expensive than our current monthly GCP bills. And since I avoided falling into the micro-services pitfall, I have no need for it either. But I do love Docker. That makes deploying software stupidly easy. Our website is a Google storage bucket that is served via our load balancer and the Google CDN. The same load balancer routes rest calls to two vms that run our monolith. Which talk to a managed DB and managed Elasticsearch and a managed Redis. The DB and Elasticsearch are expensive. But having those managed saves a lot of time and hassle. That just about sums up everything we have. Nice and simple. And not that expensive. I could move the whole thing to something like Hetzner and cut our bills by 50% or so. Worth doing maybe but not super urgent for me. Losing those managed services would make my life harder. I might have to go back to AWS at some point because some of our customers seem to prefer that. So, there is that as well.