Comment by tpetry

2 years ago

And when you have performance issues you still need a DBA. Because RDS only runs your database. It is up to you to make it fast.

You'll need an engineer with database skills, not a dedicated DBA. I haven't seen a small company with a full time DBA in well over a decade. If you can learn a programming language, you can learn about indexes and basic tuning parameters (buffer pool, cache, etc.)