Architect to the numbers, not the trend
Why I run a self-hosted data center and fluent Azure/AWS at the same time — and why that isn't a contradiction.
The fastest way to spot an inexperienced architecture is that it picks its infrastructure before it knows its numbers. Cloud-native because cloud-native is the default; Kubernetes because everyone has Kubernetes.
I do the opposite. I treat cloud-native (Azure/AWS) and self-hosted as a menu, and I let the budget and the business indicators choose. For a public, traffic- sensitive product, a managed CDN wins on reliability and cost-per-request. For a steady internal workload with predictable compute, a self-hosted data center I already own is dramatically cheaper than renting the same cycles every month.
That's why I run both. The data center isn't an ideological statement against the cloud — it's a line item that made the numbers better for the workloads that sit on it. The Azure and AWS fluency is real and used where it makes the numbers better.
The skill isn't loving one option. It's being honest about the indicators and right-sizing to them.
(Seed post — replace with your own.)