While what you describe above is certainly one mode of using AWS, that's not the only approach and I don't believe it is the most widely used. My source is atte

While what you describe above is certainly one mode of using AWS, that's not the only approach and I don't believe it is the most widely used. My source is attending re:Invent and local meetups. Take Netflix or Airbnb as two examples. These are large cloud-native businesses with huge application developer staffs. These companies do not hogtie those staff by making IT (or ops) the interface to AWS. They create and leverage open source tools like Spinnaker (and Asgard before that) to eliminate IT services all together. Netflix infamously called this approach "Noops." If I take your approach and assert myself as the "gatekeeper" between some 300 software developers and the public cloud, I may enjoy some sense of control. This sense is false and doomed to be short lived. Sooner or later, these same developers will realize all I am is an interface and they will read documentation, find blogs, and internalize that they too can hit AWS APIs. Some folks call this "Shadow IT." One thing we can agree on is fewer ops people overall. A huge chunk of the work I used to do in the ops role included buying gear, racking, stacking, building data centers, provisioning OS, networking, repairing, etc. In the cloud, all that is done for me. Staking out the middleman role doesn't hold any allure for me. I'd prefer to help lead the developers into a self-service model and show them how public cloud changes the rules of the game enabling them to change their perspectives, improve and rewrite their applications, and generally move much faster. This model is working quite well for me today. I dare say the developers are equally happy. They certainly have questions about more traditional ops stuff. Those questions get answered and circulated around the team. Eventually, the questions start moving toward cloud ops stuff. How do we autoscale? What's the right AZ redundancy model? How do we setup Direct Connect? When should we use spot instances? That shows evolution and learning.