As an avid cloud user, I'm always amused by people who suggest that moving things to the cloud means you don't have to manage them. And, of course, when I say "amused," what I really mean is I feel lnigo Montoya in Princess Bride. "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
Why do I say this? Because I am an avid cloud user and I manage my cloud assets all the time. So where do we get this idea? I'd say it starts with the idea that you don't have to manage the hardware. Push a few buttons and a "server" magically appears in your web browser. This is so much easier than creating a real server, which actually works similarly these days. Push a few buttons on the right web site, and an actual server shows up at your front door in a few days. All you have to do is plug it in, load the appropriate OS and application stack and you're ready to go. The cloud VM is a little bit easier. It appears in minutes and comes preloaded with the OS and application stack that you specified during the build process.
I think what most people think when they say their cloud resources don't need to be managed is that they don't have to worry about the hardware. They know that the VM is running on highly resilient hardware that is being managed for them. They don't have to worry about a failed disk drive, network controller, PCI card, etc. It just manages itself. But anyone who thinks this is all that needs to be managed for a server must never have actually managed any servers.
There are all sorts of things that must be managed on a server that have nothing to do with hardware. What about the filesystems? When you create the VM, you create it with a volume of a certain size. You need to make sure that volume doesn't fill up and take your server down with it. You need to monitor the things that would fill it up for no reason, such as web logs, error logs, database transaction logs, etc. These need to be monitored and managed. Speaking of logs, what about those error logs? Is anyone looking at them? Are they scanning them for errors that need to be addressed? Somebody should be, of course.
Another thing that can fill up a filesystem is an excessive number of snaphshots. They need to be managed as well. Older snapshots need to be deleted and certain snapshots may need to kept for longer periods of time or archived off to different medium. Snapshots do not manage themselves.
What about my favorite topic of backups? Is that VM getting backed up? Does it need to be? If you configured it to be backed up, is it backing up? Is anyone looking at those error logs? One of the biggest challenges is figuring out when a backup didn't run. It's relatively easy to figure out when a backup ran but failed; however, if someone configured the backup to not run at all, there's no log of that. Is someone looking for backups that just magically disappeared?
Suffice it to say that the cloud doesn't remove the need for management. It just moves it to a different place. Some of these things may be able to be offloaded to the cloud vendor, of course. But even if that's the case someone needs to watch the watcher. There is no such thing as free lunch and there is no such thing as a server that manages itself.