>What you see as “rapid iteration” looks a lot like redoing the same work every few months because of shifting cloud-native limitations.

This is not the case. The reason for iteration is the search for solution in the space we don’t know well enough. In this particular case cloud made iteration cheap enough to be practical.

I asked you to think about what it would take to build well integrated suite of tools (PG + backups + snapshots + prom + logs + autoscaling for DB and API + ssh key management + SSO into everything). It is a good exercise, if you ever built and maintained such a suite with uptime and ease of use comparable to AWS I genuinely would like to hear about it.