[throwawaymath]

In fairness one "random DevOps dude" might be equally capable and less expensive for your infrastructure. Generally speaking any software company can succeed without a cloud provider's infrastructure, it's just a matter of cost and developing that competency in-house. There are many site reliability engineers who specialize in high availability and downtime resolution on baremetal hardware. StackExchange notably has this competency internally.

[user5994461]

Site reliability is a new fancy name for the sucker who is on call.

They will change career after being forced to work on week ends and holidays a few times. Incidentally, today is a Sunday AND the most taken holiday of the year.

[throwawaymath]

Not all site reliability engineers have a bad work life balance.

[user5994461]

The ones at AWS and Google, maybe not.

The ones who are the single "random DevOps dude" at a small company trying to emulate AWS and Google, do have zero balance.