A friend of mine, upon reading my post on the cloud skills shift, commented that he thought that the role of the IT systems architect was actually diminishing in the enterprise. (He’s an architect at a media company.)

His reasoning was simple: Hardware has become so cheap that IT managers no longer want to spend staff time performance-tuning, finding just the right configuration, or getting the sizing and capacity planning at its most efficient, any longer.

Put another way: Is it cheaper to have a senior operations engineer on staff, or is it cheaper to just buy more hardware?

The one-size-fits-all nature of cloud may very well indicate the latter, for organizations for whom cutting-edge technology expertise does not drive competitive advantage.