There’s a big gap between hobby self-hosting and enterprise. Clouds are appealing (note, not technically better but more appealing) in the enterprise for numer

There’s a big gap between hobby self-hosting and enterprise. Clouds are appealing (note, not technically better but more appealing) in the enterprise for numerous reasons. We already have a contract, I don’t have to spend a month with procurement. Their support is “respected” so “I asked AWS and they told me to pound sand” is an acceptable response to a lot of requests. No one ever got fired for picking AWS. The list goes on. None of those friction points apply to hobby hosting, really. IAM is annoying because the alternative isn’t “fill out 7 forms and host 12 meetings to get a new vendor in”. You also get less of the benefits. Low volume SQS can be trivially replaced, but if you use enough that you’re debating making a whole team to manage Kafka then paying the cloud tax can look appealing because of the predictability (your Kafka team might fail, SQS probably handles larger workloads currently). At some scale, not having to wait 12 months for the message queuing team to support TLS for some regulation becomes worth a cloud tax.