To quote TFA: "Some things are simpler, others more complex, but on the whole, I've yet to hear of organizations at our scale being able to materially shrink their operations team, just because they moved to the cloud."

Something I've observed for some time as well. If Ops was truly outsourced to the cloud service providers then why is devops such a buzzword/trend, hmm?

The complaint in the comment above was that on-prem was chaper but they couldnt hire people with the necessary skills. Obviously it is not actually cheaper if you don’t factor in hiring the necessary skills.

I suppose that is just another way of expressing my point; comparing hardware on a like-for-like basis, on-prem is cheaper. Once you factor in the hiring cost and adjust for the availability of those skills (since that is never truly reflected in the salary, in my experience) - then cloud becomes "cheaper" not in money but in opportunity-cost and reduced staffing-related business risk.

Generally, with cloud, you still need people with required skills. Engineers who write Terraform ("DevOps") aren't cheap. They certainly cost more than the old-school sysadmin who will set up a bare metal server with shell scripts.

You definitely don't want them using shell scripts. That's cloud-init/Ansible work. And you can do all of those through terraform as well.

Now your cost has gone up. There’s a reason I said “old school.” Shell scripts are perfectly viable for setting up a handful of bare metal servers.