> * cloud's automated management requires way less man-power to operate
My experience here is the opposite. I did contracting in the devops space for years, and those of my clients who spent the most on ops were consistently those using cloud providers.
My experience is the opposite: Those who see it as important and core to their business are more likely to own. The rest tend to see cloud services as a way to reduce capex. Never mind that you can rent or lease managed servers and still save.
It was almost uniquely down to complexity and e.g working around lack of flexibility (fitting workloads to cloud services and instance sizes rather than fitting the environment to the services).
We'd always run everything under an orchestrator, whether on prem, in colos or in clouds anyway, and with the same monitoring and same redundancy.
My experience here is the opposite. I did contracting in the devops space for years, and those of my clients who spent the most on ops were consistently those using cloud providers.