I think he means the usual stuff, so monitoring (disk space, memory, disk io, slow queries), patching (following mailing lists, emergency patch on sunday afternoon), failover, scaling (read replicas, multi master), backup, backup restore test, tuning, auth, security etc.

How does a cloud offering's going to help you with slow queries and tuning? Same for the security part (the biggest threats coming through your app anyway).

Honestly, I don't know and would like to know as well. Can you share some insights into how much a cloud database allows to be tuned?

I haven't used a cloud offering before, but OP was asking about managing and operating a database. And that list is what we do at work or at home.

> initial setup and configuration?

If you think there is nothing more to maintaining a database than initial setup and configuration, you are in for a rude awakening. Shit happens.

I mean how much time daily would it take on average?

I felt like generally you have nothing to do, except sometimes you gotta do something like respond to disk quota alert and stuff

you dont need to do much, i would say my time budget on self hosted replicated and backed up MySQL database administration is under 20 hours per year. yes the first couple years took more time (learning, building out a backup strategy) but id have the same amount of learning with a hosted solution so i don't consider that part of time spent.