I know currently our problem is finding proper staff and that is why we are considering moving to a cloud provider. Especially for database hosting, using a database as a service becomes very attractive from a staffing perspective just because we can't seem to find good candidates and we've been training younger people into being DBAs but they ultimately want to do something else after a while.

We use Amazon RDS. It's still 10x the price of bare metal, but that is acceptable and it's fast enough for most things. Plus they have automated backups and certified encryption.

RDS and the like still need about the same amount of DBA'ing, no?

I'm assuming it takes care of monitoring and managing space, disks, backups etc. I mean the true administration tasks, not helping with designing the database and queries.

As I said, we are considering but the analysis hasn't been done yet. If you have insight, please.

No.

I'd agree...

It's also for speed to market... Our Infra setup where I work is extremely slow and at times takes over 1 month to setup a database.... and a VM about the same.

Sure, because EC2 instances don't need any admin work. Unless you're doing serverless architectures, you'll still need sysadmins.