Am I the only one who reads "I'll never own another server" and thinks about all the folks who said "I'll never hire another programmer" back when sites like Elance first started getting popular?
Outsourcing is great and all, but it's hardly the panacea people make it out to be.
That's a fairly insulting way to look at the art of system administration, database administration, and the like. Anyone who's ever been any good at those jobs would disagree that you can automate them any more than you can automate software development.
It makes sense to outsource those functions when you can't afford to hire someone who knows what they're doing and when what you're doing exactly fits the cookie-cutter mold of what the vendor is offering, and when you're willing to trust an outside vendor with core business functionality (or when it's not core to your business). But a skilled sysadmin or DBA will absolutely add value that you won't get from outsourcing.
You know what.. I am supposedly skilled sysadmin, middleware admin and a DBA, so let's assume I know what I mean. And I dare to say that for many cases many tasks usually attributed to "us" can be automatized (and who's writing such layer? of course an admin, not a programmer; a casual programmer doesn't have mindset needed).
I earn money on the large projects (telco industry mostly) where people like us are absolutely needed and without us the things would turn into chaos & hell. Still you don't need an admin to build an infractructure for a small app when you have service providers like Heroku. Then admin can be given another work to do (esp. coding, as most of admins make excellent coders, not necessarily vice-versa).
You may think these are quite strong opinions, inconvenient for some people maybe, but I live in the industry for 15 years or so and that's what I see all around.
Outsourcing is great and all, but it's hardly the panacea people make it out to be.