Readable standby instances is something AWS just recently added actually: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/readable-standby-insta...

Though it seems to require you to have 3 instances rather than just letting you read from the standby... I don't quite get the rationale for that.

Even though a hot standby is technically the exact same thing as a read only replica, it solves 2 very different problems (uptime vs scaling). Personally, I never want read only queries going to my hot standby, otherwise I risk the secondary can’t handle the load in case of failover. Probably a reason like that with AWS as well, as they are selling a “hot standby” product to ensure the uptime for your RDS.

> when you pay for a hot standby you can't use it as a read only replica (true for AWS

I'm not sure what you mean here. At least for MySQL you can have an instance configured as replica + read-only and used for reads. Aurora makes that automatic / transparent too with a separate read endpoint.

A hot standby is not a read replica. It's a set of servers running in a different Availability zone mirroring current prod, that is configured to automatically fail over to if the primary is offline. It's been a few years since I personally set this up in AWS, but at the time, those servers were completely unavailable to me, and basically doubled the cost of my production servers.

The fact that a hot standby is usually in some sort of read-replica state prior to failing over is a technical detail that AWS sort of tries to abstract away I think.

They recently announced readable standby instances.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/readable-standby-insta...