Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a hard time imagining how supporting multiple providers would cost millions of dollars per year. I think it's a worthwhile way to make your software and infrastructure more resilient. And it protects you from vendor lock-in. As long as you keep things simple and don't use features that are only implemented by one provider, VMs are basically interchangeable.
Do you run Postgresql, MySQL, or something else? What led you to your choice? Because one is inherently better than the others for what you want to do? That's why you stick with a single cloud provider. You want the vendor lock-in. You go whole hog into using everything that they provide. Once you start mixing and matching the best of breed across cloud providers, you've lost. Once you start coding to the least commo…
It does make sense to standardize on one open-source database package (MySQL in the case of my employer). But that's software that I can take with me anywhere. And it's open-source. So the risks of vendor lock-in don't apply.
> Otherwise, why are you running stuff in the cloud anyway?
How does it follow that if I don't lock myself into one cloud provider all the way, it's not worthwhile to use the cloud at all? Maybe using cloud providers is worthwhile simply because, at a certain scale, they're less expensive than leased dedicated servers, never mind the up-front cost of buying and colocating hardware. Also, it's easy to provision cloud VMs on demand, then throw them away when you're done with them. Those are good reasons to use cloud providers without locking into just one.
It seems to me that the best approach is to use only the subset of features that are common to DigitalOcean, Vultr, and maybe Linode, and abstract over those multiple providers with software like Ansible that can access multiple provider APIs.
I am indeed suspicious of proprietary solutions for deploying and migrating across cloud providers, such as Cloud66. But that's only because using one of those solutions would itself be an instance of vendor lock-in. If there were an open-source package with similar functionality to Cloud66, I would probably use it.