It's definitely common for IT staffing costs to increase rather than decrease with a cloud transition, at least so far. Part of the problem is that you often ar

It's definitely common for IT staffing costs to increase rather than decrease with a cloud transition, at least so far. Part of the problem is that you often are trading off sysadmins (relatively cheap) for engineers (relatively expensive), as you reengineer your system to run on top of ephemeral, distributed cloud servers, with new failure cases and new technology stacks. This is often justified on the basis that a large chunk is one-time engineering cost that will pay for itself in the long run. But that's a speculative bet, especially considering how much technology churn is happening so far (e.g. a bunch of companies that invested heavily in early 2010s cloud stacks are now re-investing in Docker). It's possible things will stabilize enough for such companies to eventually lay off many of their distributed-systems engineers and devops staff, and go more into cloud-autopilot mode with low IT headcount and lower staffing cost than pre-cloud-transition. But I don't think many companies are there yet, and I wouldn't bet a lot of money on it myself.