I'm not op, but thanks for this. Like I mentioned in another comment, the wholesale move to the cloud has caused so many skills to become atrophied. And it's good that someone is starting to exercise that skill again, like you said. The hyperscalers are mostly to blame for this, the marketing FUD being that you can't possibly do it yourself, there are too many things to keep track of, let us do it (while conveniently leaving out how eye-wateringly expensive they are in comparison).
The other thing the cloud does not let you do is make trade offs.
Sometimes you can afford not to have triple redundant 1000GB network or a simple single machine with raid may have acceptable down time.
yeah this
it means that even after negotiating much better terms than baseline we run into the fact that cloud providers just have a higher cost basis for the more premium/general product.