Every place I’ve ever worked at that had DBAs had the complete opposite of more flexibility. You have to do things the DBA’s way, and if their way doesn’t work for your service, you need to fight for their time and priority.
Meanwhile every place I worked at where every team completely owned their databases + did periodic data recovery drills had much more flexibility and no data loss.
My personal experience has been the opposite of yours: lots of data inconsistency issues, data loss only resolved by the database team spinning up backups, etc. And somehow, even after yet another incident, there’s never been appetite to properly fix things.
Managed databases don’t lose customer data. They would be sued and lose, and if word got out, they would lose their customers. They are optimized for the machines they run on. The proprietary tooling from AWS for managing HA clusters, doing blue-green upgrades and monitoring for slow queries is all miles ahead of the open source tooling available for self-managed databases.
There’s nothing left for the DBA to do.
And yet here we still are
So the same thing I said we do, a periodic validation of recovery, but with an acceptably short period.
SWEs can do that too. They can even write software to do most of it automatically.
They went through systems design interviews to ensure they know how to scale without picking technology choices that require a dedicated human caretaker.
It’s the opposite. Needing a DBA to operate a completely managed database is a sign of not enough maturity.