> No one says "we don't need someone to setup/maintain our servers".
Of course they do. And there are a lot of products which are marketed using that idea:
"AWS Elastic Beanstalk is the fastest and simplest way to get an application up and running on AWS. Developers can simply upload their application code and the service automatically handles all the details such as resource provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and monitoring."
The configuration management/orchestration tools also help with that (you don't need anyone to provision the servers, take care of dependencies etc., you can just include these 15 Chef cookbooks, and everything will be done automatically). Btw: I'm not saying configuration management tools are bad - they are a must-have, I'm just saying - nothing will replace a person who knows what they are doing.
> Developers can simply upload their application code and the service automatically handles all the details
In this situation, you've basically traded your own Ops staff for a combination of your developers and whatever support AWS provides you - so you're back to a managed service like every man and his dog was using in the 90s.
Of course they do. And there are a lot of products which are marketed using that idea:
"AWS Elastic Beanstalk is the fastest and simplest way to get an application up and running on AWS. Developers can simply upload their application code and the service automatically handles all the details such as resource provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and monitoring."
The configuration management/orchestration tools also help with that (you don't need anyone to provision the servers, take care of dependencies etc., you can just include these 15 Chef cookbooks, and everything will be done automatically). Btw: I'm not saying configuration management tools are bad - they are a must-have, I'm just saying - nothing will replace a person who knows what they are doing.