the FreeBSD migration didn’t take that long - iirc this was the frontend migration to an IIS ISAPI.
the Solaris bits (storage and routing tables) took far longer - and again iirc the frontend had been rewritten in C# before all the Sun hardware had been decommissioned.
you pull packages from a trusted package repository, not from the internet. this is not rare in my experience (financial services, security) and will become increasingly common due to software supply chain issues.
having a local simulator (DynamoDB, Spanner, others) helps me a lot for offline/local development and CI. when a vendor doesn't off this I have often end up mocking it out (one way or another) and have to wait for integration or e2e tests for feedback that could have been pushed further to the left.
in many CI environments unit tests don't have network access, it's not purely a price consideration.
(not a turbopuffer customer but I have been looking at it)
fun times for sure.