[awj]

> Do you have a sense of what that limit is?

Per their pricing page[1] it looks like the largest instance available is a "db.r3.8xlarge", which is a special naming of the "r3.8xlarge" instance type[2] which is 32 cpus and 244gb of memory.

That's a hell of a lot of capacity to exhaust, especially if you're using read replicas to reduce it to only/mostly write workloads. Obviously it's possible to use more than this, but the "sheer scale" argument is a bit of a flat one.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/pricing/ [2] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/#r3

[euyyn]

Wouldn't the write master be I/O-bound, rather than CPU- or memory-?

[computerex]

I disagree, the "sheer scale" argument is not flat. The fact that one can scale horizontally and the other can't is significant.

Let me present a quote to you: 512 kb ram ought to be enough for everybody

[awj]

You can disagree on that if you'd like, but note that I explicitly acknowledged the possibility of exceeding these limits. In my opinion, for most cases/workloads, it's highly unlikely that you will and designing for that from the outset is a waste of time and resources.