You can use RDS without HA. Many people probably should do this, but no one wants to tell their boss they want to disable RDS HA and wear 1h of downtime a year so they can cut 50% of their spend.
> no one wants to tell their boss they want to disable RDS HA and wear 1h of downtime a year so they can cut 50% of their spend.
If you're a SaaS, 1h of downtime costs a lot of money. In reputation, in lost business, in support time, in on-call response, in making a public postmortem and sharing it to customers and dealing with responses... For saving a few thousand bucks, it's often indeed a very bad deal.
Most of those are already priced in (support costs, time dealing with a postmortem), and an hour of downtime a year isn't going to meaningfully harm the reputation of most companies, I'd wager a lot of clients wouldn't even notice.
Of course this isn't true for some companies and the cost of downtime far exceeds the cost of HA. Most companies think they are that company, most aren't. And even if they are, "AWS had an outage" does a lot of lifting.
Every time I get a new client they need constant point in time backups, failover, HA everything. Usually when the costs are explained they change their mind and an hour old snapshot restore is actually fine
If you're a SaaS, 1h of downtime costs a lot of money. In reputation, in lost business, in support time, in on-call response, in making a public postmortem and sharing it to customers and dealing with responses... For saving a few thousand bucks, it's often indeed a very bad deal.