[ilyt]

As a developer and sysadmin, there is no trade and only difference is that you probably (and I'm saying probably because probably some poor fucker had at some point) won't need to debug NIC driver/firmware problems on "cloud" server.

We have both on-prem and cloud stuff, we've ran automation (via Puppet mostly) from the very beginning, and so far biggest difference is that writing template-backed YAMLs is utter shit compared to "proper" programming language or purpose built DSLs.

Like, I complained that Puppet is just kinda "shitty half-finished programming language" compared to just having Python/Ruby as DSL but boy I'm fucking happy to use it now (and to be entirely fair, it got better over time as a language) compared to whatever the fuck tool is in vogue this time that uses the "data language + template language" (because apparently programmers deploying the code can't program or something) model for interaction.

Same kind of work sans running to DC to fix stuff but you now have black boxes you have no chances fixing/analysing yourself and your broken code might fix itself next day because you thought it was your bug, but just a given cloud API decided to return nonsensical error that looked like it was your fault (greetings to MS Graph API team here)

[p_l]

  As a developer and sysadmin, there is no trade and only
  difference is that you probably (and I'm saying probably 
  because probably some poor fucker had at some point) won't 
  need to debug NIC driver/firmware problems on "cloud" 
  server.

Then the words "private cloud" drop by, and you find yourself fixing idiotic purchasing decisions that somehow led you to building custom firmware ROMs for intel X520 NICs

[kneebonian]

If you listened to half the managers at my current client DevOps simply means using YAML to configure your infrastructure.