I wonder that sometimes too. I came from the sysadmin world. I was always interested in that kind of stuff (like setting up my network at home) and cloud technology made it easy to learn while I had my first job in tech support.

Really I’m a “major cloud provider sysadmin” who learned a few DevOps things over a couple of months (Docker, Kubernetes, a good amount of PHP) to take jobs that offered big salaries...

Cloud Architect / Engineer roles usually will pay at least 20k less than whatever has DevOps in the title.