[api]

Maybe if you are gigantic, but there is a long tail of people with <1TB database needs that don’t really need shards and can be well served by a fail over cluster with a master and one or two replicas that can become masters.

These days you don’t really need shards until you hit many terabytes or even more depending on your read and especially write load. NVMe storage is really fast and lots of RAM for caching has become cheap.

[panyam]

So my point was around all things a managed for gives you (eg sharding and replication). Even by the time I had to setup streaming replication and have to worry about wal drifts it is easier to pay a managed provider no?