When we published How moving from AWS to Bare-Metal saved us $230,000 /yr. in 2023, the story travelled far beyond our usual readership. The discussion threads on Hacker News and Reddit were packed with sharp questions: did we skip Reserved Instances, how do we fail over a single rack, what about the people cost, and when is cloud still the better answer? This follow-up is our long-form reply.Over the last twenty-four months we:Ran the MicroK8s + Ceph stack in production for 730+ days with 99.99...