Almost every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret

Early on, we were using both GCP and AWS. During that time, I had no idea who my "Account manager" was for Google Cloud, while at the same time I had regular cadence meetings with our AWS account manager. Unless you're penny-pinching, there's no reason to run your own control plane rather than use EKS. The main advantage of using an alternative in AWS, like ECS, is the deep integration into AWS services. Luckily, Kubernetes has caught up in many ways: for example, using external-dns to integrate with Route53. We've since switched to using helm charts for what were add-ons and things are running much better with promotions that fit similar to our existing GitOps pipelines. While a CPU node could have dozens of services running at once, spreading the per node Datadog cost between many use cases, a GPU node is likely to have only one service using it, making the per service Datadog cost much higher. If you're using EKS, you should be using Karpenter. Using Infrastructure as Code is a must for any company.