However, most people do not - some will learn, but most will fall for the cloud marketing depts and become infra renters for life. Teach a man to fish, and so on.
It was actually painful to see start ups spending thousands a month on hosting, that could be easily achieved as you say under 100 pcm plus. They would have to get a contractor to set it up and for support, but it would have worked out much cheaper and they could have bumped the salaries of their workers.
Why is that?
You see the same thing in the corporate world for in-house stuff. Your manager (and your manager's manager) don't want to hear about in-house or self-hosted things that AWS can provide.
This is totally understandable. It's a repeat of the whole "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" mantra of computing's early decades.
It also totally sucks.
Do you have any learning recommendations for someone looking to start down this path? I've only ever worked in an infra-renter context, and I've begun exploring the 'rent from Hetzner, manage your own infra' for personal projects, but I would love to learn from the paths of experts where possible.
Ideally, you also have some exposure to this at $job as simply building DIY infra horrors without seeing the real-world context, tradeoffs, etc. in which they typically operate will be misleading.
1. a DNS monitoring with failover (DNSMadeeasy has a decent solution)
2. a Haproxy setup with health checks for switching to a working upstream service
3. a distributed filesystem
4. a master-slave replication with monitoring (something like Mariadb + orchestrator service)
and nightly backups for all this. Database and FS are latency sensitive so they shouldn't be too far apart.
So, yeah, it's good that you asked, because it's not as widely known as the people that use it think it is.