Not every Umbraco site belongs on Umbraco Cloud, and not every one belongs on bare Azure. Here's the split we settled on.
When Cloud wins
For standard editorial sites with low custom infra, Cloud's deploy model pays for itself. For anything with queues, background jobs, or odd SQL needs, we go direct to Azure.
- Cloud: content-heavy, single-site, small team
- Azure: multi-site, custom pipelines, bespoke infra
- Never split the database across both
The rule we keep coming back to: pick the host that matches the team who'll be answering the pager at 2am.