* Sorry for the confusion, our customers do not necessarily want to deploy database in a container. It is just we encountered lots of folks who wants to do that and asked us about how to handle HA and backups. Though, I don't think it is rare situation to be in. Even in this thread, there are multiple people asking about running Postgres on K8s.

* We saw many deployments where communication between web server and database were going through public internet. It doesn't need to be for anonymous users. It is also even somewhat common where web server and database are managed by different SaaS providers, so they have to (in most cases) communicate through public network.

* We (and all cloud providers) are trying to reduce overall provisioning time, mostly to reduce the friction for first time users. There is no SLA but for common instance types, it would be unusual to wait for more than 1 minute at AWS, Azure or Ubicloud for VM provisionings.

Maybe you and I just experience different parts of the big computing ecosystem, hence what is "usual" for each of us is different. Out of curiosity, are you coming from enterprise background?