Hire cloud engineer talent who treat infrastructure as code. Production cloud engineering requires: Terraform modules (not click-ops), Kubernetes operations (not just cluster creation), networking design (not default configs), and the monitoring/alerting that detects problems before users notice.
Cloud engineering demands: IaC (Terraform/Bicep), container operations (Docker, Kubernetes), CI/CD pipeline integration, network architecture (VPCs, subnets, firewalls), security (IAM, encryption, compliance), and cost optimization.