[GabeWeiss_]

Code improvements. Indices aren't taken into account at all since that's so workload dependent. Having said that, the index advisor can make finding the right indices to improve performance there more easily as well. Vacuum management handles figuring out the right time to do garbage collection for you, etc. None of that is part of that 2x improvement.

[inscrutable]

That's impressive, surprised there's that much juice that could be squeezed without changing architecture. I ask because AWS Aurora is flattered in comparison to RDS due to e.g. some dumb oob pg settings that a lot of people don't change.

From seeing the cloud alloydb I had imagined most of the improvements were due to the wal-shipping and cloud native aspects.