Grant Fritchey argues that the DBA role is here to stay:
One of the reasons I love DevOps so much is because I’ve done it successfully. I’ve worked on teams that built fully automated deployment mechanisms to get code from Dev to Production. Further, we automated the creation of dev & test servers. We automated the creation of production servers too. We automated the heck out of everything.
And then they fired me…
Kidding.
When we started building our DevOps processes, I was supporting two development teams. As we got better at automating our work, I was supporting three teams. By the time we had fully automated all the various processes, I was supporting between five and seven teams at different levels.
To support Grant’s point, I’ve had a draft in my personal blog entitled “The Cloud is not Stealing Our Jobs” from May of 2017 that I never got around to finishing. Back in 2017, that was what was going to kill the DBA role.
The role has certainly changed over the years. I suppose if your definition of a DBA is someone who lays out indexes starting on certain drive sectors to take advantage of rotation speed on that single 5400 RPM spinning disk drive AND NOTHING ELSE, then your job might not be there. But that describes exactly zero people I have ever known in the industry.