Yep, these people are called sysadmins. With AWS they are the ones who manage firewall rules, patching, etc on your instances as well as API keys etc. Some people like to call them devops because they didn't realize sysadmins could write scripts.
Maintaining 40 racks of hardware takes a surprisingly trivial amount of time aside from regular OS management.
The only products that actually eliminate these folks are things like Lambda + DB as a service.
> Maintaining 40 racks of hardware takes a surprisingly trivial amount of time aside from regular OS management.
I think it's only surprising to people who have been listening to the "it's awful" mythology or believe in a much higher than reality hardware failure rate.
I think the worst I've ever seen was with spinning disks from the time of the Thailand flooding, and even those were only 10-15% AFR and only for certain models.
Absent that kind of black swan event, one can easily engineer around even disk failures, such that failed ones can just be spun down and left in place, and, of course, one can do the same with server-level redundancy.
If the labor burden were actually onerous, it would be easy enough to avoid it, but I think it's telling that such techniques are so rarely spoken of.
Only when there's no argument in the first place and the decision is already made.
I don't think I've ever seen AWS (or any public cloud) require more labor in terms of hours/persons, but I routinely see it require labor that's more expensive, since we're back to a market where programmers are paid more than sysadmins.
Maintaining 40 racks of hardware takes a surprisingly trivial amount of time aside from regular OS management.
The only products that actually eliminate these folks are things like Lambda + DB as a service.