One time gcp argued that since they did return 404s on gcs for a few hours that wasn’t an uptime/latency sla violation so we were not entitled to refund (tho they refunded us anyway)

Man, between costs and shenanigans like this, why don't more companies self-host?

1. Leadership prefers to blame cloud when things break rather than take responsibility.

2. Cost is not an issue (until it is but you’re already locked in so oh well)

3. Faang has drained the talent pool of people who know how

If you think that’s bad you should see the outages when you self host without a big enough team to really manage it.

Opex > Capex. If companies thought about long term, yes they might consider it. But unless the cloud providers fuck up really badly, they're ok to take the heat occasionally and tolerate a bit of nonsense.

You can lease equipment you know…

Yep. I was an SRE who worked at Google and also launched a product on Google Cloud. We had these arguments all the time, and the contract language often provides a way for the provider to weasel out.