Are "Solution Architects" dead?
I recently had a colleague mention to me that Solution Architects (SA) are dead/dying and boy did I have something to say about this! Let's break it down... With the rise of managed IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) PaaS (Platform as a Service) offerings such as AWS's RDS (Relational Database Service), I've endlessly heard a similar thing as to why "DBAs are no longer needed" and "no one hires DBAs anymore". The simple fact is that while these services make things easier to manage, such as backups and restore, the traditional DBA isn't replaced by them. Inevitably when the database has an issue/outage, someone in Ops is tasked, by a panicking manager, to "get the database back up again and explain what went wrong". More often than not the person being assigned here has little/no experience with the inner working of a database and couldn't tell a "B-tree" from a "Hickory" 😉 With that aside out of the way, I'll ...