If you look at it from the point of view of creating a new company that is based online, chances are that you can design the system from the ground up to be entirely hosted in the cloud. Even better than AWS is if you can host your site on a PaaS solution such as Google AppEngine. GAE negates the need for a DBA, netadmin and a sysadmin.
I'm building a web based company right now with a good friend of mine and we've gladly chosen GAE because of this single attribute. Both of us are 15+ year sysadmins as well as software engineers. That said, instead of worrying about how we are going to scale and run everything, we are able to focus entirely on the development of features and building the company. As a result, we hope to never have to hire any IT positions.
In the end, I don't think the roles will go away since someone still needs to run Google. ;-) I just think that the roles will eventually morph a bit for the companies that can take advantage of PaaS solutions.
I'm building a web based company right now with a good friend of mine and we've gladly chosen GAE because of this single attribute. Both of us are 15+ year sysadmins as well as software engineers. That said, instead of worrying about how we are going to scale and run everything, we are able to focus entirely on the development of features and building the company. As a result, we hope to never have to hire any IT positions.
In the end, I don't think the roles will go away since someone still needs to run Google. ;-) I just think that the roles will eventually morph a bit for the companies that can take advantage of PaaS solutions.