This isn't "script all your resources in Terraform so you can move to Google Cloud, hypothetically". We're talking about a database system here. By now, we've learned many times over that an open-source platform is a huge benefit; if we're at the point where Microsoft is being forced to admit it via things like SQL Server and .NET Core, I'd say that the closed-source platform ship has more or less sailed at this point. Aurora moves you off an open platform and onto a closed one. This is a bigger concern than "Amazon probably won't shut it down tomorrow".

And on top of that, in the realm of database engineering, Amazon is absolutely a newcomer, they've got another good 15 years before they can even start to be in contention for "reliable and trustworthy database vendor". Goes doubly when you consider that Aurora is essentially just a bunch of performance hacks to (old versions of) InnoDB and Postgres. Presumably, upstreams like MariaDB and PostgreSQL have forgone similar enhancements for a better reason than "only Amazon employees are smart enough to figure it out".

> And on top of that, in the realm of database engineering, Amazon is absolutely a newcomer, they've got another good 15 years before they can even start to be in contention for "reliable and trustworthy database vendor"

They did hire a bunch of experienced engineers. I'd rather have them actually contribute to postgres (which amazon pretty much doesn't do, some bug reports aside).

> Presumably, upstreams like MariaDB and PostgreSQL have forgone similar enhancements for a better reason than "only Amazon employees are smart enough to figure it out".

Some of them are harder to do if you don't have as much control over the environment as amazon does...

Based on what I've heard, these aren't hacks on Postgres - more a pluggable storage engine. Haven't cross checked this, but I think both MySQL and Postgres have a swappable low level storage API. AWS has made engines that use their specific infrastructure to make all these changes - there are technically no changes in either the MySQL or Postgres engines themselves - only the storage layer.

That's why no announcements cover change fundamental change to either database - all the features we're seeing a the kinds you'd do on a personal scale with SSD RAIDs and ZFS (or other copy on write FSes), except on a datacenter scale.

There are millions of companies that still use SQL Server and Oracle. Open source is not the be all and end all.

Have you seen the code see to know that they are just “performance hacks”? Have you thought that when you can actually spend millions on a project you might be able to throw some top notch engineers at it?