In this model, hosts don’t need any direct internet connectivity or access to public DNS. All outbound traffic is forced through the proxy, giving you full control over where each host is allowed to connect.

It’s not painless: you must maintain a whitelist of allowed URLs and HTTP methods, distribute a trusted CA certificate, and ensure all software is configured to use the proxy.

And so, it seems, is everything else. Perhaps, this commentary adds no value — just old man yells at cloud stuff.

In my databases, I often prefer integer primary keys for performance reasons. On the other hand, I don't want to expose my primary keys because they are easy to guess.

Recently I've been playing with Rust, and ended up publishing a library to encrypt IDs in they way I like:

https://crates.io/crates/cryptid-rs

That's a factor of about 2.2x, assuming 7% capital gains year-on-year.

If the sums are large, it would've made a lot of sense for Orange to delay the decision for 12 years until having to pay.

But I'm not sure at all of the sums here were that substantial.

IMHO, I think “free” should be reserved for the wider meaning encompassing all the various aspects of freedom.

And a (new?) word like “gratis” should be used for the you-dont-have-to-pay-money-for-this-now meaning.

Instead locking accounts, appropriate throttling might be a better idea.

It's also possible to use auto-incrementing database IDs and encrypt them, if using UUIDs doesn't work for you. With appropriate software layers in place, encrypted IDs work more or less automatically.