In this context it's useful to note that RDS instance pricing is ~50% higher than the pricing for the underlying EC2 instances. That 50% reflects the (pure software) value-add over EC2.

When someone like Heroku offers a competing product, the fact that the product is also being run on EC2 is only a part of the overall story. Over time, AWS will probably be less and less happy with earning just the bare infrastructure dollars for such use.

> In this context it's useful to note that RDS instance pricing is ~50% higher than the pricing for the underlying EC2 instances. That 50% reflects the (pure software) value-add over EC2.

Just build a HA RDS Cluster yourself with Click and Scale, than you can sell it to me with ~25% higher prices than the EC2 instances. Btw. AWS RDS is cheaper than most other competitors like ElephantSQL.

Just stating a fact about their pricing (in the context of whether Heroku is a competitor or not). Not judging the relative value of the offerings at all. I'm an RDS user, FWIW.

Sorry, I'm not sure what you mean. It used to be the case that Heroku is/was built on EC2. They also offered a managed database (Heroku Postgres) built on EC2. Do you mean they're a partner because they're building a product on top of EC2?