Cloud providers are trying to abstract it all away while in reality the real world factors cant be abstracted. E.g. latency if servers aren't close enough, I/O

Cloud providers are trying to abstract it all away while in reality the real world factors cant be abstracted. E.g. latency if servers aren't close enough, I/O performance due to virtualization, disk latency if you are using block storage, etc... have to still be understood. What I've noticed with people using the cloud is that they have to still understand how the cloud services work and many times make up for it in app logic. Look at Netflix for example having to make their entire infrastructure extremely tolerant to latency due to the spiky nature of AWS. At the end of the day, you will have to deal with these factors. You can either do it by learning how the cloud works and figure it out there or by running your own infrastructure. One important point the article makes is that if you roll out your own you can at least control those factors. It's not to say that clouds aren't useful. They provide a lot of value to many apps but it's not a silver bullet that makes it so you can be ignorant of infrastructure. Maybe one day it will be but as of right now it's important to understand the tradeoffs if you plan on using the cloud.