> The cloud ain't magic folks, it's just someone else's servers.

The cloud is where the entire responsibility for those servers lives elsewhere.

If you're going to run a VM, sure. But when you're running a managed db with some managed compute, the cost for that might be high in comparison. But you just offloaded the whole infra management responsibility. That's their value add

But any serious deployment of "cloud" infrastructure still needs management, you're just forcing the people doing it to use the small number of knobs the cloud provider makes available rather than giving them full access to the software itself.

not sure what you mean by a serious deployment, but a lot of companies will be perfectly fine with, some compute, object storage and a managed rdbms.

Will that be more expensive than running it yourself? Absolutely. Does it allow teams to function and deliver independently, yes. As an org, you can prioritize cost or something else.

> a lot of companies will be perfectly fine with, some compute, object storage and a managed rdbms.

Right, and who or what causes those services to be provisioned, to be configured, etc.?

Infrastructure as code tools like terraform etc? That's trivial compared to configuring a database for production use I would say.

You don't need to be DevOps to write that stuff, it's really simple.

And who is writing the terraform configs?

The cloud is magic. If it is down nobody is in trouble. You just throw your hands in the air and say oh azure / aws / gcloud is down.

But if you are the admin of a physical machine you are in deep trouble.