RDS will manage replicas for you. But you can't run your own non-rds replicas.

correct. RDS does not even let you do a true, vanilla postgres backup to s3. the lock-in is complete

You can easily use pg_dump to do a "vanilla" backup to s3. Its a managed db service but if you wanted to run your own you can extract your data and move to a new db. The lock is not "complete" you are acting like you can't even extract your data.

i believe they're taking about being able to ship wal to s3 so the back up is close to real time.

"Only export your data with pg_dump" is one of those misfeatures that makes RDS mediocre. They don't really expose much of the power of the underlying DB.

you cannot ssh to RDS machine. so u need to get another EC2 machine and pg_dump over the network. the connection breaks - yes has happened to us multiple times.

RDS makes it very inconvenient to do anything other than use their managed services.

because RDS backup data storage is VERY EXPENSIVE even compared to s3. this is very deliberate.

Using pg_dump for migration of large DB is very difficult due to the downtime it might involve.

This is exactly the issue I have right now on Aurora. We have a 30TB db and there's no easy way to export it to S3 for backup. The closest we have found is this... https://docs.percona.com/percona-xtrabackup/2.4/xbcloud/xbcl...

Anyone else have any idea if there's a better option??