I fully agree on the SA stuff. Sadly more often than not it's some dev who knows enough to be really dangerous. I make a good amount of money by coming in and mopping up after those kinds of scenarios (sadly... I'd rather make less money up-front by helping in the planning phase). I will say however that while yes, it's a risk shift you can still have and will have plenty of those risks that are shifted to the cloud still unaccounted for. For instance, backups. Just because your servers are now on 'the cloud' does not mean they're immune from losing all of their data if the instance dies, especially on EC2. On EC2 it's generally just a 'whoops, bye!' scenario. At least with Rackspace cloud it might be a 'whoops, restore from a VM image snapshot from last week'.