Except they do have IT infra as a skill - or did - and replaced it with higher-paid “cloud architects” who just manage VM fleets and DBaaS in the vendor they’re certified in, which could just as easily be done on-site nowadays. They’re lower-skilled overall but more specialized, and thus command higher pay.
Generalists (it me) typically command lower market rates, remain far more flexible, and can replicate much of the experience on-prem while knowing when and why to put something in the public cloud. A few examples:
* 24/7 Telemetry and Monitoring: if you have the talent to roll your own with OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Prometheus, and a database to store the telemetry involved, then great! If it’s me wrangling a hybrid environment though, I’m likely leaning on New Relic to save on headcount and deliver similar results.
* DBaaS: this is increasingly just offered by hypervisor managers since it’s often just spooling up a container and pointing to storage. Not quite a “solved problem”, but enough of one that a single DBA can cover both estates if needed - or a moderately skilled generalist can at least secure it for internal use before offering it out to customers
* Vulnerability Management: as much as I’d love to have an internal Red Team, it’s an order of magnitude cheaper to leverage Nessus, Wazuh, Wiz, or any of the other fleets of continuous scanners to identify vulnerabilities or misconfigurations
That’s just me cherry-picking. The point is less “do everything possible on-prem”, and more “diversify workload placement depending on cost advantages relative to risk models”, and on-prem wins quite handily for a lot of LOB software that just quietly sits and does its thing with minimal fuss.
Generalists (it me) typically command lower market rates, remain far more flexible, and can replicate much of the experience on-prem while knowing when and why to put something in the public cloud. A few examples:
* 24/7 Telemetry and Monitoring: if you have the talent to roll your own with OpenTelemetry, Grafana, Prometheus, and a database to store the telemetry involved, then great! If it’s me wrangling a hybrid environment though, I’m likely leaning on New Relic to save on headcount and deliver similar results.
* DBaaS: this is increasingly just offered by hypervisor managers since it’s often just spooling up a container and pointing to storage. Not quite a “solved problem”, but enough of one that a single DBA can cover both estates if needed - or a moderately skilled generalist can at least secure it for internal use before offering it out to customers
* Vulnerability Management: as much as I’d love to have an internal Red Team, it’s an order of magnitude cheaper to leverage Nessus, Wazuh, Wiz, or any of the other fleets of continuous scanners to identify vulnerabilities or misconfigurations
That’s just me cherry-picking. The point is less “do everything possible on-prem”, and more “diversify workload placement depending on cost advantages relative to risk models”, and on-prem wins quite handily for a lot of LOB software that just quietly sits and does its thing with minimal fuss.