I mean, networking in general is difficult and complex. While most of my work is in the "systems" realm of IT, my formal education was primarily in the networki

I mean, networking in general is difficult and complex. While most of my work is in the "systems" realm of IT, my formal education was primarily in the networking side of things with systems as an "also-ran". The complexities of public clouds like AWS and Azure isn't so much new complexity in networking, but a deliberate change in vocabulary and implementation of existing concepts to justify the higher salaries of those certified on a given cloud. After all, if it was the same process to implement, say, HAProxy on AWS as it was on-prem, then the illusion of "new" is shattered and customers might realize they're just paying more money for their same infrastructure, but with shiny new terms and a more consistent API/CLI experience. After you translate the vocabulary, the process is pretty similar until you get to security items, like ACLs or packet-inspection firewalls. You're still setting up VLANs in the form of subnets, routers in the form of transit gateways, sites in the form of VPCs, inter-site connectivity through peering connections, you get the idea. If there's one thing I've learned in my IT career, it's that most "new" ideas are just rebrands of existing concepts, and that the real expertise comes from being able to translate marketing-speak into concrete, interchangeable fundamentals. Public Cloud is, largely but not entirely, no different in this regard.