To me it's the same thing. You can pay somebody to care about that, but they might be underutilized for the majority of time so it's not worth it. If you have a service, instead of your security expert being used idk 1/x of full time, they can be y/x where y is the number of contracts. For me and my time we are just way too small to have somebody full-time dedicated. So that's how I think about it

It is a reasonable point. But i think it is not exactly that. Having your organisation focus on maintenance is a certain type of opportunity cost. It is pretty often one of your most knowledgeable engineer that does this. And it also interrupts the flow of many of your other engineers.

All of these services - be it in or out of the cloud - are trivially available as service contract with external providers.

I'd love to see some real figures on that. My gut feeling is most companies spend as much on AWS experts as they previously did on people running in house facilities but I really don't know.

Probably more. Folks that do IAC / Terraform are more expensive than old school sysadmins that would write shell scripts.

I have never had a client that got away with less maintenance because they used cloud.

In fact, those of my clients who insist of relying on cloud, tend to spend far more with me for similar complexity systems. I love taking their money, but I'd frankly rather help them save it, because longer term it's better.