That's a very pragmatic philosophy. I'm especially impressed at your unusual focus on vendor neutrality as a lack of it costs many companies millions in long run (see IBM & COBOL). Since I mostly avoid clouds, I'm not up to date on that end. I'd like to attempt your style of things as an experiment in the future, though.
Do you have a resource or resources for what components, strategies, or platforms are best for the deployment you describe? Something useful for production apps, reliable, and easy to move from dedicated hardware all the way to AWS (or back if necessary). I'm sure there's other readers on my end of things that might be interested as well.
