I was wondering about that. Every time I looked at AWS pricing, it seemed insanely expensive for the people that just forklifted their on-prem services into the cloud without re-architecting it to fit that type of environment.
...Most people who move to the cloud end up still needing IT staff to manage it, and are now, by proxy, paying for the cloud provider's IT staff too. (Hidden underneath all of those cloud providers are a silent army of IT people.)
A recent conversation I had was whether to replace a server (five figures) when a neighboring organization was on the cloud for the same technology (three figures per year per device). The latter sounded a lot cheaper until you multiplied the devices by that three figure amount, and multiplied it by the five years the server's contract covered. The cloud solution became more expensive that the physical service in a little over a year.
I have similar conversations about Office 365. It costs twice as much as buying on-prem Microsoft Office, even if you buy Office every version. There's really no reason not to skip every other release of Office, which makes it practically four times the cost of on-prem.
If I have about 20 VMs running on a $10,000 server with a $6,000 Windows Server Datacenter license that has a five year warranty, let's math that out: The VMs cost $32,400. And I can spin up more VMs on that server at zero cost, it's not at capacity.
Obviously there's plenty of other little dollars and cents you can factor into an equation like this, but I'd argue Azure Reserved Pricing still has it's profit margin well defined.
I can definitely say last time I was in the job market, the majority of available IT jobs in my area was with MSPs, but there were tons of jobs available.
If you move to a cloud provider, change your processes, and reduce your number of IT people and use a combination of an MSP and a business support plan, you can save some money. If you only move to the cloud and don’t do either of the other two. You will spend a lot more money.
From the side of an IT person, it can go either way. Now that companies don’t need on prem IT people. The MSPs can rural source (get people a lot cheaper in lower cost of living areas) and outsource lower level IT folks. Either way there will be a lot of jobs, but there will be more people who can do it and wages will be lower for commodity IT folks.
On the other end, the true customer facing consultants can make a lot more. But if all you can do is click around on the AWS Console, don’t expect to make a lot.
I’m mostly a $long_time developer but I know my way around AWS and my next job will probably be a around AWS consultancy but I really want to stick to developing/architecting on top of AWS and not just doing “lift and shifts”.
MSPs can also standardized procedures across clients, automated processes at scale, etc.
If you’re just doing a lift and shift and porting a bunch of VMs it will cost more and unfortunately that’s all most outside AWS consultants know how to do. They were usually IT folks who managed some on prem resources, watched a few ACloudGuru videos, got one AWS cert and now market themselves as “Digital Transformation Consultants”, who can click around on the AWS website.