I agree, and honestly part of the problem is that people seem to have this notion that Heroku, AppEngine, or Azure will scale to infinity without any extra work

I agree, and honestly part of the problem is that people seem to have this notion that Heroku, AppEngine, or Azure will scale to infinity without any extra work on your part. At some point regardless of your tech, if you are at a large enough scale, you need to control your own destiny.