[sourc3]

Persistence ignorance introduced by mainstream ORMs about 5-7 years ago have turned the new generation of programmers blind to the fact database IS part of your application. Records you save don't get sucked into a magic black box that just responds to your queries as your app needs grow.

DBAs are not going to go anywhere. Sure, you can scale the DB in the cloud quite a bit in and perform well but it's not free :) In the cloud, you would be literally paying for your bad design decisions in terms of hard dollars rather than performance issues.

Most start-ups or in house apps are fine while the salary(dba) => cost of cloud. However, that magic condition starts returning false pretty quickly if you are doing any non-trivial data management.