My take on how a decade (or more) of using cloud services for everything has seemingly deskilled the workforce.
Just recently I found myself interviewing senior security engineers just to realize that in many cases they had absolutely no idea about how the stuff they supposedly worked with, actually worked.
This all made me wonder, is it possible that over-reliance on cloud services for everything has massively deskilled the engineering workforce? And if it is so, who is going to be the European clouds, so necessary for EU’s digital sovereignty?
I did not copy-paste the post in here because of the different writing style, but I get no benefit whatsoever from website visits.
At least where I work, our cloud team is ~35 people who manage the whole thing.
The datacenter team? In the hundreds.
Cloud is not the answer to every infra problem, but the flexibility, time to market, and lifecycle burden are easily beneficial weighed against finops. I’m an Azure engineer myself, it’s no comparison the benefits to a managed solution vs rolling your own DC for a lot of regular business workloads and solutions. Beyond that personally I’ve been able to skill up in areas I wouldn’t be able to otherwise if I was stuck troubleshooting bad cables, rebuilding a dead RAID array, or planning VMWare scaling nonsense.
But those are absolutely not the only 2 levels. Server rental can be managed easily by the same infra team who manages the cloud, for a fraction of cost.
I will say more, the same exact team that spends time managing EKS clusters could manage self-managed clusters and have money to spare for additional hires.