> many startups settle in on a ops solution before hiring ops
replySounds expensive
Not really. It's cheaper than hiring an IT admin and sysadmin for a while.
replyThose tend to be tricky hires on the small end since you tend to want jack-of-all-trades who either demands a premium salary or doesn't exist.
When you have 10 software engineers, having 1 dedicate 10-20% of their time is cheaper than hiring 1-2 FTEs that aren't writing code.
Unless we're talking actual PaaS (Heroku, Render, Railway, etc), the cloud also needs a dedicated skillset, so "cloud" doesn't remove the need from a sysadmin.
replyIf you can get (and trust they do it right) developers to do AWS or Kubernetes, you should be able to trust them to do conventional Linux sysadmin on a bunch of dedicated boxes.
I suspect you're either severely underestimating what the cloud offers or thinking of a very narrow set of software businesses.
replyA full stack/backed dev is more than capable of learning both, but one of those has way more foot guns than the other.