In the early days of the cloud, the foundational infrastructure services were reason enough to develop new workloads there. However, as those services matured and the cloud vendors quickened their pace of innovation, they began to develop other services that were managed versions of existing software customers had been using. The reason for this is simple: the goal of the large cloud providers is to innovate on behalf of the customer so that the undifferentiated heavy lifting of managing environments is reduced, freeing up time and resources for business requirements. One of the early areas where this approach was used successfully was with databases. The large cloud vendors will have managed versions of popular database platforms for customers to use. But should a customer use the cloud managed version or deploy and manage them on their own? The answer to that question really comes down to whether an organization has the core competency in that technology and believes they can do it cheaper and faster than the cloud vendor can. Even then, companies that decide to manage their own software should be prepared to have a fast rate of iteration so that they keep up with the latest software for that service; otherwise, they will be passed as the cloud vendor innovates on the service.