Jason Miller (4/16/2009)
I guess it all boils down to the fact that at SOME point, you still have to have people that deal with the machines themselves and not some abstraction. The only thing that I see the cloud initiatives doing is pushing that responsibility to another group of people.
Agreed. The "cloud" already exists for most people, perhaps not for most DBAs - at least not yet. To me this is more like a further refinement or division of labor within the DBA ranks compared to what exists now.
Much like users and developers today never see the servers or databases they use or care where they are or what kind they are (as long as they work) - some DBAs will become more removed from all that also. And some will work in "up in the cloud" where they actually can see and touch the servers and work more directly with the databases.