[kennygorman]

True.

But most of these folks didn't have DBA's or even OPS engineers before they became customers.

Mostly they are teams of developers, they have developed the application and have (I think correctly) worried about the customer experience, code base, IP, performance, etc.

They do want the database driver API (in this case MongoDB) to just work beyond the interface. Backups, scaling, filesystems, etc they want to be part of the service, and just handled.

This is true for new business and it's true for businesses that are developing new apps or new projects or even projects that can't scale out on other infrastructure.

Full disclosure: I wrote the article in question ;-).