Exactly. The whole promise behind cloud was "you don't need an ops team". Now go check for yourself if that's true: go to your favorite jobs portal and search for AWS, or to include Azure and Github sysadmins search for "devops engineer". And for laughs search for "IAM engineer", which is a job only about managing permissions for users (not deciding about permissions, JUST managing them and fixing problems, nothing more. And frankly, the cloud is to blame: figuring out correct permissions requires teams of PhDs to do correctly on infuriating web interfaces. The job portals show: no corporate department should ever go without a team of IAM engineers who are totally not sysadmins)

What do you get for this? A redundant database without support (because while AWS support really tries their best to help, if you pay enough, they don't get time, and redundant databases are complicated whether or not you use the cloud). S3 distributed storage. And serverless (which is kind of CGI, except using docker and AWS markups to make one of most efficient stateless ways to run code on the web really expensive). Btw: this is all available as a helm chart, with effectively the same amount of support.

Oh, and you get Amazon TLA, which is another brilliant amazon invention: during the time it takes you to write a devops script it comes up with another three-letter AWS service that you now have to use, because one of the devs wants it on his resume, is 2x as expensive as anything else, doesn't solve any problem and you now have to learn. It's all about using AI for maximizing uselessness.

And you'll do all this on Amazon's patented 1994-styled webpages because even claude code doesn't understand the AWS CLI. And the GCP and Azure ones are somehow worse (their websites look a lot nicer though, I'll readily admit that. But they're not significantly more functional)

Conclusion: while cloud has changed the job of sysadmin somewhat, there is no real difference, other than a massive price increase. Cloud is now so expensive that, for a single month's cloud services, you can buy hardware and put it on your desk. A 8GB mac mini, even an M1, runs docker far better than the (now reduced to 2GB memory) standard cloud images.