All which you have to do on a cloud provider. Fire/Power are normally handled by the DC. You have to have someone with knowledge in the first place to operate that in the cloud and taking an application such as HAProxy is on the same skill level. Especially with vast fields of blogs you can find on the topic.

The cloud brings the instant "power-up" methodology and I would compromise, you could be right. If you want a perfective optimum cloud platform you would need a dedicated "cloud" engineer if you want to ensure security, connectivity etc. etc. But if your going to do that then again you might as well move in-house and hire a system admin, you've still got to operate your companies infrastructure. It's a moot point.

> The value to our customers for using cloud providers is the time saved on building infrastructure is instead spent on delivering value to the customer in the form of features/bug fixes.

I suppose this is a mixed area and what customers value varies. For me I value a service that uses it's own hardware rather than cloud. On the basis that they are willing to put the skill in to operate their own infrastructure rather than.

> I think you're vastly oversimplifying the task.

I don't think so. People seem to think that setting up what you can in the cloud is impossible on bare metal when really it isn't. What did devOp's do before the cloud providers? Amazon,Azure,X have only lassoed FOSS software, constructed a webGUI-admin panel and throw it as a service.

This is not to say Cloud doesn't has a purpose, otherwise it wouldn't exist today.

> it's something you're pretty familiar with so it makes sense that it's easy to you

While true, I won't disagree, I've been working in the SysAdmin field since 2009. But disagree as I started with very little knowledge and gained it through setting up such infrastructures. I've educated a few and those with very little knowledge of servers could setup an infrastructure that companies run in AWS.