[ben509]

The author didn't just delete the database. He deliberately installed it on an ASG, which is designed to drop instances.

Using an ASG to manage a production database is a tale from the land of What The Everloving Fuck Were You Thinking, as you note, the author makes a habit of bad practices.

It's at least instructive to note that there is only one canonical good practice when working with AWS:

    Always assume you are handling a footgun until you have proven you aren't.

For instance, you might think that Cloudformation is a reasonable way to manage a database in RDS because it's an integrated service and you can keep your configuration in source. That must be a good practice, right?

While they have improved the AWS::RDS resource in that there are fewer ways in which small configuration changes will drop your database, there are still big red banners in the documentation.[1]

To do it, you must specify a policy to say, "please don't nuke my prod database."

Because AWS will always default to being a footgun.

[1]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGui...