There is a famous quote, attributed to Mark Twain, that goes like this:
This excellent quote has given rise to a flourishing industry of books and self-help coaches who urge you to eat various frogs in your life; we heartily agree with all of their advice (well, most of it). Don't shy away from upfront effort and unpleasantness; it will pay off in spades tomorrow. That's the general idea, and we heartily agree, particularly in the context of choosing a compute option on the cloud.
We saw, early in the book, how compute choices range from Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to Platform as a Service (PaaS). Depending on where you are coming from, either the IaaS or the PaaS extremes are likely to seem most appealing to you. If you are coming from a small startup or an organization that does not have a lot of legacy infrastructure, the PaaS options...