[cookiecaper]

Do people ever look at how much more they're paying for Aurora? I've saved companies thousands of dollars per month just by switching them to standard RDS instances for systems that see tiny load and were only on Aurora because that's "the super good AWS-optimized version, duh".

The added benefit of this is that you then know what software you're running, instead of Amazon's fly-by-night hackjob. We've hit several real-world bugs that were either incorrect backports of something that had been patched years before upstream, or wholly new issues caused by whatever they're doing to make Aurora auroar.