To my mind as much as some marketing people might like to portray the "cloud" as being revolutionary, it's really just an evolution / different way of doing the same things as before, and it simply provides us with another option of how to do things.

For instance, currently we've got a number of physical servers in racks at a few different datacentres, each of them has several VM's running serving a number of different roles. To move those VM's to "the cloud" would be stupid, since it would cost us more than it does now. However, if we need to run a new server from a completely different location, paying to have a new physical server hosted just to run a single VM would be expensive, and at that point the cloud would become cheaper and a better option.

I definitely agree that the skills landscape is changing, and we all need to pay attention and keep our skills relevant, but then that's just part of working in this industry. Anyone who wants to learn a set of skills and then use them till retirement has chosen the wrong industry. As a Sysadmin and accidental DBA, when I started 12 years ago almost everything I did was on-premise, now most of what I do is hosted (though fortunately we host and manage our own kit, so at least I get to stay more hands on than some).

Some elements of what we do becomes simpler, with more automation, wizards etc, but that's always offset by the ability to do far more complex things with the technology, and that's where anyone needs to focus if they want to keep up.