I’m seconding this recommendation

Well I don’t wear underwear at all already 😀

Kubernetes is extremely expensive on cloud so we run our own in house

Our problems with VMs on Azure were:

• The Azure Linux Agent incrementing versions and breaking stuff.
• The availability zone becoming over utilized and our non reserved VM clusters fail to start up.
• Changes to Azure automation runbooks breaking scripts and schedules. (unrelated to the stuff they warned about)
• Azure invisible proxy terminating ssh sessions as inactive while doing long running tasks and having to use the awful serial console.

We take a cloud agnostic approach to systems development so we have flexibility. Our team is quite small and we use Manageengine for patching servers and Atera for patching users systems. We only use a few cloud native services like AWS event bridge, load balancers, S3, Lambda, Azure DNS, Azure storage, Azure App service. But if needed we could pull any one of those and move to an open source solution without too much fuss. The red tape comes from exec level and their appetite for risk. For some reason they think cloud is more stable than our own servers. But we had to move VMs off Azure because of instability!

Yeah we were hit hard by the cost projections. It really sucks. But HCI stack from MS remains even more expensive. We have decided to bring as much as we can in house and only put the workloads that have strict contractual uptime agreements on our VMware or HCI stack. The rest of the stuff goes on KVM or bare metal to save costs.

Same, we use AWS, Azure and a third party VMware suite cloud. The VMware is superior by far IMO because I like to have full control of my systems and roll my own stuff. I think the big clouds make their money by saving time on dev ops. I come from a sys engineering background and transitioned to development so none of that stuff is very difficult. I’ve tried Linode, Hetzner, Digital ocean and a few more but I think VMware does all I need.