[vidarh]

I love RDS, but it really does not save all that much time beyond initial setup that's trivially contracted out. A low retainer to someone who knows how to do this will be far cheaper than RDS. By all means use RDS when you can justify the cost - if it's a rounding error of your total cost base there's no point finding someone to do a proper setup. But it doesn't all that large or complex a setup before there are huge savings to make even at inflated contractor rates from having someone manage it for you. More so if you do it outside of AWS entirely, though.