Thank you for sharing! There's no excuse for staying on AWS (or Azure) these days, but it's hard to convince executives because the alternatives are marketed much less.
It’s also the pain AWS sales is pounding on IT teams that want to switch with a „too good to be true offer“ and some steak dinners with your c-suite later and you have to suffer through endless meetings with „specialists“ that are everything but.
There are lots of alternatives for database solutions with Kubernetes, in Hopsworks we use RonDB which is highly available and has a MySQL interface but also supports a REST API and even a prototype Redis service.
I guess I am saying it's a good value more than its raw price being less than other offerings.
The blue/green deploys, auto snapshotting, failover, upgrades, few-click resizing, etc justify the price vs running database servers (for me). I spend a lot of time looking for money in aws and never consider replacing RDS with anything else.
Theyve both done a really good job of following a similar vendor lock-in strategy to oracle as well as using their salespeople to scare the shit out of timid, risk averse execs over things like security and compliance.
This is how their market power was built - with FUD, lies and tricks. Theyve now gotten to the point where theyre comfortable enough with this market power that they can lean on it while pursuing a strategy of developer wage compression.