I began thinking about this a while ago: How does managing a cloud-like or Database-as-a-Service environment change a DBA's day to day role? And after a chance comment by one speaker at the Oracle Day event in Dublin last November, I began to seriously consider that maybe it doesn't, maybe a cloud only looks like a cloud from the user/client perspective, but not to the DBA.
My current employer began a massive consolidation and standardisation program across all their Oracle and SQL Server installations a few years ago, and gradually this morphed into what we might now think of as a cloud, or more precisely DBaaS. We wanted to remove complexity from all our users, so they never had to consider where their database was, what it was running on, how it was managed -- everything would be just there. The users provided some information (size, number of users, etc) up front, we ran through some sizing algorithms, and slotted the new schemas into our pool of databases. The end user got a service name alias and some login credentials, and access to the databae resources they needed. Job done.
So database management became significantly simpler from the users' point of view. But it didn't change much from the DBA perspective. We still had backups to manage, queries to tune, user ids to create and reset, the occasional storage issue to resolve, and all the usual DBA bits and bobs.
The standardisation of the database configuration and environment simplified a few tasks (but did not remove them), and we had a new streamlined provisioning process; but after the easier set up, little changed in the DBA role -- we are still managing what amounts to a large collection of separate databases.
As with all DBA tasks, the technology moves inexorably forwards, making it all a bit easier (though not always simpler!), with the latest advances in Oracle 12c and OEM12c making provisioning and management easier still.
But I'm not convinced that DBaaS as a concept changes that much for the DBA.
