[clouded]

I love relational databases. I think they are among the greatest products to come out of the entierty of computer science, ever. You're right, I do care about application performance and index tuning and query optimization. But it would make no sense to ask me to be a DBA.

[likis]

What would the role of the DBA be if you are the one creating tables, tuning indexes and optimizing your queries?

[clouded]

I thought about how to reply to this, but database roles vary so differently from company to company, it's a bit of a rabbit hole to go down. Whether you call what I described being a DBA or not, I don't think it's reasonable that a software developer would now "own" the database and all that entails. It just so happens that the database fits nicely into being "owned" and managed in AWS. And it also may neatly obviate the need for the DBA role. Although, I think that's debatable too.