In theory with perfect documentation they’d have a good head start to learn it, but there is always a lot of unwritten knowledge involved in managing an inherited setup.
With AWS the knowledge is at least transferable and you can find people who have worked with that exact thing before.
Engineers also leave for a lot of reasons. Even highly paid engineers go off and retire, change to a job for more novelty, or decide to try starting their own business.
unfortunately it lot of things in AWS that also could be messed up so it might be really hard to research what is going on. For example, you could have hundreds of Lambdas running without any idea where original sources and how they connected to each-other, or complex VPCs network routing where some rules and security groups shared randomly between services so if you do small change it could lead to completely difference service to degrade (like you were hired to help with service X but after you changes some service Y went down and you even not aware that it existed)
"Today, we are going to calculate the power requirements for this rack, rack the equipment, wire power and network up, and learn how to use PXE and iLO to get from zero to operational."
Part of what clouds are selling is experience. A "cloud admin" bootcamp graduate can be a useful "cloud engineer", but it takes some serious years of experience to become a talented on prem sre. So it becomes an ouroboros: moving towards clouds makes it easier to move to the clouds.
That is not true. It takes a lot more than a bootcamp to be useful in this space, unless your definition is to copy-paste some CDK without knowing what it does.
If by useful you mean "useful at generating revenue for AWS or GCP" then sure, I agree.
These certificates and bootcamps are roughly equivalent to the Cisco CCNA certificate and training courses back in the 90's. That certificate existed to sell more Cisco gear - and Cisco outright admitted this at the time.
But will the market demand it? AWS just continues to grow.
The number of things that these 24x7 people from AWS will cover for you is small. If your application craps out for any number of reasons that doesn't have anything to do with AWS, that is on you. If your app needs to run 24x7 and it is critical, then you need your own 24x7 person anyway.
Meanwhile AWS breaks once or twice a year.
I've only had one outage I could attribute to running on-prem, meanwhile it's a bit of a joke with the non-IT staff in the office that when "The Internet" (i.e. Cloudflare, Amazon) goes down with news reports etc our own services are all running fine.
I am sure it happens a multitude of ways but I have never seen the case you are describing.
What do you think RedHat support contracts are? This situation exists in every technology stack in existence.
> 4) Ends up using a "managed service" to relieve the panic
It's not as though this is unique to cloud.
I've seen multiple managers come in and introduce some SaaS because it fills a gap in their own understanding and abilities. Then when they leave, everyone stops using it and the account is cancelled.
The difference with cloud is that it tends to be more central to the operation, so can't just be canceled when an advocate leaves.
I'll give you an alternative scenario, which IME is more realistic.
I'm a software developer, and I've worked at several companies, big and small and in-between, with poor to abysmal IT/operations. I've introduced and/or advocated cloud at all of them.
The idea that it's "more expensive" is nonsense in these situations. Calculate the cost of the IT/operations incompetence, and the cost of the slowness of getting anything done, and cloud is cheap.
Extremely cheap.
Not only that, it can increase shipping velocity, and enable all kinds of important capabilities that the business otherwise just wouldn't have, or would struggle to implement.
Much of the "cloud so expensive" crowd are just engineers too narrowly focused on a small part of the picture, or in denial about their ability to compete with the competence of cloud providers.
This has been my experience as well. There are legitimate points of criticism but every time I’ve seen someone try to make that argument it’s been comparing significantly different levels of service (e.g. a storage comparison equating S3 with tape) or leaving out entire categories of cost like the time someone tried to say their bare metal costs for a two server database cluster was comparable to RDS despite not even having things like power or backups.