Disclosure: I work for Google Cloud (and I assume/hope someone at Google is competing for your business). Some of those folks happily do updated things, but ot

Disclosure: I work for Google Cloud (and I assume/hope someone at Google is competing for your business). Some of those folks happily do updated things, but others (like people that rack servers) won’t have an obvious new role in a cloud focused world. My (now) colleague at Nic Harteau gave a talk at our Leaders’ Circle event talking about precisely this in Spotify’s move to Cloud: how could he keep the infrastructure team as they moved to cloud? As it turned out, most of them happily adjusted what they were doing because the mission was the same: serve the product teams / groups that need infrastructure from them. Sure, now you don’t configure a physical firewall, but there are still firewalls in cloud. In a sense, they’re even more important! I believe Nic said only one person from the group left. The engineer was focused on building their own SDN stack on-prem. That job, and other “things the provider completely handles” do go away. But that person likely would have been massively useful in helping guide how Spotify should use Google Cloud’s own SDN setup. There are lots of ways to architect how services interact in clouds, and a lot of it comes down to funny networking. So I’d say more than you might think, but please don’t mislead them.