This is effectively false because you just shift the burden of understanding infrastructure intricacies from a nominal infra team to a bunch of fractured developer teams, and they often have fight through idiot org-wide cloud policies to get anything done.
Whatever you think you save by not having to hire or retrain AWS expertise on a nominal infra team, you lose far more by now needing to hire web developers, database engineers, machine learning engineers, mobile developers, etc., that are not just very good in their particular application domain, but also competent to operate self-service AWS tooling in an optimal way, despite having to contort around and fight with org-wide cloud policies that inhibit them for no actual cost, security, uniformity, or other benefit.
What I mean specifically is that there is not even a reason to think that shifting to managed services with a cloud provider will allow you to cut costs in IT workforce or “not think about it” like you say.
It’s just marketing snake oil that CTOs continue to believe this sort of thing at all.
It is entirely possible that you are just shifting the problem around to a place where it is less visible. Answer to the original question would still be the same. But, fwiw, I think you may sometimes be correct, especially since Amazon's flotilla of services is ever-expanding, resulting in having to know just as much as before, just for a proprietary domain. One is reminded of how corporations get talked into putting their businesses into SAP-world, and then discover that they need to hire SAP specialists to run it.
Whatever you think you save by not having to hire or retrain AWS expertise on a nominal infra team, you lose far more by now needing to hire web developers, database engineers, machine learning engineers, mobile developers, etc., that are not just very good in their particular application domain, but also competent to operate self-service AWS tooling in an optimal way, despite having to contort around and fight with org-wide cloud policies that inhibit them for no actual cost, security, uniformity, or other benefit.
What I mean specifically is that there is not even a reason to think that shifting to managed services with a cloud provider will allow you to cut costs in IT workforce or “not think about it” like you say.
It’s just marketing snake oil that CTOs continue to believe this sort of thing at all.