The amount of sysadmin/SRE toil in some parts of the stack (all the distributed computing coordination layers) is super-linear in the growth of the system, but

The amount of sysadmin/SRE toil in some parts of the stack (all the distributed computing coordination layers) is super-linear in the growth of the system, but the nuanced version of the claim is that they can make up for it in the other parts of the stack (hardware cost and better global availability). A lot of people who have never seen these systems from the inside would be surprised at (1) how much engineering work is put into just getting things like "Postgres but it scales" and "Kubernetes but it works on our proprietary VM manager" to work and (2) how many internal incidents these cloud providers have that are quietly managed before they rise to the level where a customer would notice or care.