there is no need to worry about the operational overhead of managing a DB (backups, clustering, recovery etc) when you just consume it as a service; Except tha

there is no need to worry about the operational overhead of managing a DB (backups, clustering, recovery etc) when you just consume it as a service; Except that that is technically impossible! Even if it were somehow magically true, all of that magical infrastructure would be completely useless without an application which could run her own instances in parallel, and do synchronous updates of global data state from all nodes at once. This is a non-trivial computer science problem which has not been reliably solved to this present day, so the entire premise is flawed. There is no getting away from good old fashioned UNIX system and database administration, and in this day and age of distributed applications, the stakes are even higher, as now there is no getting away from system engineering. Incidentally, that includes administering and servicing hardware, but even more importantly, it includes engineering fault tolerant, distributed infrastructure. There is no getting away from that: you learned how to program, now in order to use that knowledge, sooner or later, you will have to learn how to administer systems and databases, and then you will have to learn how to engineer entire systems. Computers used to be fun when you had a Commodore 64, Commodore Amiga, or an Atari ST in front of you and you were a single user on a single system; now they are just complex and hard, and if you want to write a highly available, fault tolerant application which continues to operate correctly even in the face of severe hardware and software failures, there is no getting around learning how to administer and engineer systems.