We are using elasticsearch for non-critical log management. But as for the mysql server, what maintenance/management are you really getting from a managed service like Aurora or Google Cloud SQL?

Our K8s deployment is setup to automatically make backups and test those backups periodically with a full restore. It also notifies us in case of a failed backup. Updating the software is as easy as a single helm command and scaling is about the same as with Aurora. Either you set it up to scale up automatically or you go in and upgrade instances when needed.

Aurora admins aren't monitoring your server for performance issues then making configuration tweaks to speed things up. So I'm not really seeing a lot of difference.

What are we getting? Automatic updates, backups, point in time recovery, multi AZ redundancy of storage, autoscaling synchronous read replicas, and much better performance than your self hosted Mysql instance.

you get what you pay for. If you use managed services from a vendor, you get convenience for the price of lock-in.

You’re always locked into your infrastructure. Out of all of the business risks that most companies face, the least is being locked into your cloud provider.

Your CTO is no more going to risk an infrastructure migration because you pinky promised that it would be “seamless” than your DBA is going to migrate from your seven figure Oracle installation to Postgres because you used the “Repository Pattern to abstract your database access”.

And yet, I know many people that are chomping at the bit to migrate away from Oracle and just as many more that have successfully migrated away. Infrastructure cost can be a significant cost of your business depending on what you do.