True, but anyone who's a cheaper hire because they can "do cloud" but not homegrown also represents a sacrifice in terms of what's you get. In terms of your operational capabilities, you'll likely be paying for that with a crisis first where everyone yells at your team because of a problem in your managed provider you can't fix, and you can't get someone from the provider on the line and helpful in a way that gets you out of it faster. So then you'll tack on add a massive yearly support retainer for a response time SLA that's still bad for your business bottom line and support that's not incentivized to prioritize you. I have stories from name-brand PaaS/IaaS companies.

It's like outsourcing (I don't mean offshore, I mean any kind). It can be a reasonable thing to do if you don't pretend you're getting the same thing for less money and really actually plan around that. But people often do pretend it's the same, and the results aren't immediately apparent. And when they're finally blatantly apparent, either the guilty party has cashed out and left, or people don't have enough perspective to point to the real root cause.

I'm not saying building your own infra is generally a good idea of course. It's just that beyond a certain size, for more businesses than you'd think, reliability has to be a core competency you invest in. And homegrown is a lot easier than it used to be because the offerings in terms of tooling and platforms are way better such that you can strategically craft your level of managedness for optimum cost/benefit on multiple criteria.