[gaius]

The cost saving from going cloud in a large part comes from utilization. 1 box that you can keep busy at 100% by clever workload timing is cheaper than 10 boxes that are idle 90% of the time that you just need to spike on. Or capacity that you can give back when you don’t need it. Rack space is expensive, power and cooling are expensive.

The job of the people is to translate the business requirements into stuff actually happening, and that doesn’t go away with cloud. If anything you need to do more of it (someone has to take care of auto-scaling, a thing that wasn’t possible in your legacy DC, for example). The worst thing you can do is sack the people then realize you need consultants at 5x the cost to do anything now...