Everyone says this, but do we actually have data to back that up?

I feel like I spend so much time working around CloudSQL for postgres support in GCP at work, to a point where I'm not actually sure I'm saving a ton of time over running and managing it myself. That's probably not true, I'm sure there are edge cases that I'm not accounting for, but I'm a little tired of everyone acting like AWS and GCP and Azure are the "set it and forget it" thing that they advertise.

Not sure how you’d even measure that meaningfully.

My comment above was more k8s vs classic server rather than thinking about cloud k8s in particular.

I do agree that cloud is stuff is a huge time sink. I’ve learned to look at it in terms of how close it is to FOSS like world. Things that follow normal protocols and standards like say it speaks Postgres or is a docker image then cloud is ok. Things that are cloud vendor specific or a custom product…run for the hills. Not only is it lock in but also that’s where the pain you describe is. The engineering around it just becomes so much more granular and fragile