Yep, there the ones with stressed out Ops staff running around replacing hard drives at 3 AM and with managers trying to work out how they are going to pass the next security assessment because they don't handle end-to-end encryption or have sufficient controls in place.

Is this common?

My company recently shifted from on prem to cloud. And we aren’t primarily a software company (although, much like most companies, we are increasingly turning into one).

We outsourced our data center needs, and I don’t remember us ever facing these middle of the night massive breakdowns (we had load balancing between a couple of data centers) and the number of ops issues hasn’t reduced a bit since the switchover.

I do think it’s been easier to improve performance for non US customers, because spinning up servers in data centers across the world seems a little easier around the world, but the millions saved by self hosting would have easily paid for someone to spin us up a Singapore and UK colo servers.

If you spent $X on a SAN rack 10 years ago, that same $X now buys you a fully-managed rack with NVMe drives and redundant, hot-swappable everything. Your Ops staff will get an email about a drive or hardware failure and the tracking number for the replacement part that’s already left the depot and can be replaced at their leisure.

You experienced badly run shop. You can have remote hands (if you don't have your own DC, but buy colocation service). You have spare disks in server. I don't know, how end-to-end encryption is linked to bare metal, those physical servers are several abstraction levels below.

I think the implication was that Amazon provides more than just bare metal to lock you in.