The problem is that we’re being sold a lie and it’s hard to swallow.
“Cloud will save you on staffing costs” - no, it just means you have specialists working on proprietary solutions, just like IBM mainframes or storage appliances or load-balancers/traffic-shapers of yore.
“This technology will make rollouts easier” - until it breaks down and is not easy to put together again, you’re at the mercy of your upstream and you had better hope you keep a really solid update cadence and not introduce something you can’t consume later.
“Layers on layers means things are composable” - sometimes, but you need more people to know more things to put it together properly. Running everything from QuickStarts is doomed to fail, but I see so much of it.
Our config management tools back in the day were crummy as hell, cfengine being the only notable one (which was awful), our monitoring systems required a lot more handholding and truthfully: people were not happy to talk through requirements; which was probably why “devs run production” was appealing.
these things have gotten better, but nearly everything else has definitely gotten worse.
> 2 sysadmins were absolutely not managing “large scale deployments with multiple data centers”
Please don't make things up because I was there.
> But today it’s actually super plausible that 2 or 3 Devops with modern tooling can manage all of that.
Not really.