Yes, we’ve had outages in DCs. They are usually just a blip, because we have more than one.

And we don’t pay broadcom anything. We migrated off of esx a long time ago.

And the skills needed? We use a floss stack, so you need to know stuff like nginx, puppet, mariadb, and php.

Not exactly cutting edge stuff there.

Operations engineers make sure the infrastructure is up, and ready for code. Devs own the code.

So, no, it’s really not all that niche.