Role of the DBA in the cloud
As more and more organizations are moving towards the cloud, there has been a debate about the
future role of DBAs or database administrators. There are many industry pundits who believe that
management, automated installation, and patching capabilities of cloud databases are going to mitigate
the role of database administrators in the future. However, this is far from the truth.
The database administrators are tasked with overseeing the availability and flow of data, database
design, performance monitoring, development and configuration, back-end security, recovery and
migration, troubleshooting and support, and much more. All this amounts to the need of skilled DBAs
for ensuring the data structure continues to function efficiently and the businesses stay one step ahead
of the curve.
What role does the DBA play in the cloud?
The emergence of cloud has completely changed the way most technology-powered businesses
function. This shift has also brought in countless benefits for the organizations and in the way they build
and deploy software. However, it also requires a reconstruction of the work of most engineers including
DBAs. Concerns including fault tolerance, scalability, security in the cloud, etc. are just some aspects that
must be considered when handling data in the cloud.
As a result, a DBA’s traditional role has shifted into a somewhat amorphous domain of Data Engineering,
with the DBA becoming a key figure for the businesses and the other parts of the organization. In this
role, the DBA moves into the realm of Big Data as the databases replicate across hundreds of serves and
the SQL queries are required to run in a fraction of seconds while search across TBs of information,
something that was impossible a few decades ago.
Cloud and the role it played in evolving the job of DBA
The database technology emerged out as there was a need to empower the mammoth Space endeavor.
A number of different models for information representation were put forth, and over the course of five
decades, they have evolved and the databases have become central to every aspect of computing.
Hence, the database administration has managed to become an essential branch of engineering with the
role of DBA evolving over time. These days, the cloud services have improved and further broadened the
scope. This is why the DBA’s have to become data professionals and be called as Data Engineers instead,
as their new job description still needs to be fine-tuned. The one thing that is clear is that an increasing
need for the companies to extract maximum value from data has made the DBA job a highly lucrative
one.