We made the jump last quarter, migrating our production workload attestation from the managed Azure Attestation service to our own Provisioning Certificate Caching Service (PCCS) instance, backed by Intel's SGX DCAP. The primary driver was cost at scale, and we've definitely achieved that. The operational overhead, however, has been a steep learning curve.

The managed service was a black box: send a quote, get a verdict. Our own PCCS means we own the entire chain—the provisioning certificate fetches from Intel, the caching logic, the collateral response. The pain points have been subtle:
* Initial configuration was more than just pointing `AZ_DCAP` environment variables. Getting the PCCS to serve fresh, unexpired PCK certificates and CRLs reliably required fine-tuning the refresh logic.
* We now see the raw, unsigned SGX quote extensions (like `sgx-qe-identity`) in our verification code. We had to write the parsing logic for these, which was more complex than anticipated.

Here's a snippet of our verification layer now, where we handle the collateral ourselves:

```python
# After retrieving quote and PCCS collateral
collateral = json.loads(pccs_response)
root_ca_crl = fetch_crl(collateral['rootCaCrl'])
pck_crl = fetch_crl(collateral['pckCrl'])

# Manual chain verification & CRL checks become our responsibility
if not is_cert_valid(collateral['pckCert'], root_ca_crl):
raise AttestationException("PCK Cert revoked or invalid")

# Quote verification now uses locally-trusted roots
quote_verification_result = dcap_quote_verifier.verify(
quote=quote,
pck_cert=collateral['pckCert'],
pck_crl=pck_crl,
qe_identity=collateral['qeIdentity']
)
```

The biggest "pain up" moment was an incident where our PCCS cache served an expired root CRL due to a silent failure in the refresh job. It caused a partial outage because our verifiers started rejecting all quotes. Debugging meant tracing through the entire DCAP chain, not just our application logs.

For teams considering this path: the cost savings are real, but be prepared to build expertise in the PKI intricacies of the DCAP ecosystem. You're no longer just consuming an attestation result; you're managing a critical part of the trust pipeline. Has anyone else gone through this transition? I'm particularly curious about how you monitor the health of your PCCS and the freshness of collateral.