These are all true and valid points. True story: having AWS (or any cloud experience) on your resume today is a major boost to your money earning potential: A. because its rare to have several years experience. B. because the space is growing rapidly (again all of cloud). If you haven't started teaching yourself the basics of cloud computing platforms start today because your next job or the job after that WILL involve you running applications on public cloud.

In my experience from pre-AWS days hiring good Ops people for systems, networking, etc is hard no matter what. I'd argue that the developer's role/day to day changes little in the move from traditional "on-prem" type infrastructure to cloud, even with serverless platforms in play. Generally speaking though I'd aim to hire people who are hungry to learn and have enough fundamental knowledge of networks, operating systems, and hardware to be able to ramp up on public cloud technologies. If you learned it one way, you can learn it this way and there's a massive amount of people here at AWS at least to help you along the way (training folks, support folks, solutions architects) as well as 3rd parties like ACloudGuru, Linux Academy, and others with training/consulting capabilities. The future of technology is moving towards public cloud and I'd argue serverless application development models whether you want to get on board or not. No one cried for the last blacksmith in the town when cars replaced horses.

Best practices are hard for people to follow no matter the technology, and the easiest solution is rarely the "best" (see people leave SG's wide open, open S3 perms, etc). We at AWS know its our job to make security best practices easier to grok and implement and there are tools that help with that today (IAM testing/reviewing tools, trusted advisor as examples). There's more we can do here.

Thanks for your reply!

- Chris