It's untrue that "the cloud" is always the right way. When you're on a multi-tenant system, you will never be the top priority. When you build your own, you are.
Google and AWS have vested interests (~30% margins) in getting you into the cloud. Always do the math to see if it's cost effective comparatively speaking.
Transparency from GitLab is excellent but you shouldn't really generalise statements about cloud suitability without the full picture or "Walking a mile in their shoes".
> Providers don't provide a minimum IOPS, so they can just drop you.
The reason I ask is because the blog post generalizes a lot about what cloud providers offer or what the cloud is capable of, but doesn't explore some of the options available to address those concerns, like provisioned IOPS with EBS, dedicated instances with EC2, provisioned throughput with DynamoDB, and so on.
You're right that the blog post was generalizing.
BTW We looked into AWS but didn't want to use an AWS only solution because of maximum size, costs, and the reusability of the solution.
So, RAID multiple EBS volumes and you have a larger disk.