Brent Ozar argues that production DBAs will still be important even at cloud-only companies:
One of my favorite recent examples was a company who came to me saying, “We’re spending about $2M per year in the cloud just on our databases alone. Can you help us reduce those costs?” Absolutely: with just a couple of days spent query & index tuning, we chopped their biggest database expenses in half while increasing performance.
At the end of that engagement, the CTO told me, “I thought I’d save money in the cloud by not having a DBA, but what I’m learning is that in the cloud, I actually get a return on my DBA investments.”
I completely agree with this post. The exact tools DBAs use will change, but the role will still be around decades from now. And that’s at the companies which move quickly.