Yes. RDS is a very reasonable choice if you are a tech company, let alone a govt org. The alternative isn’t “let’s host this ourselves” it is “let’s host this with Oracle at a much higher cost”.

The alternative - at government scale - is absolutely 'let's host this ourselves' and that's what they should be doing, to ensure that institutional expertise remains. They should also own and operate their own datacentres which should be physically secure, not shared with commercial ventures and guarded by the armed forces, not civilian security.

Why doesn't the government manufacture their own cars? They're going to lose institutional expertise in building cars! They should also own and operate their own manufacturing facilities which should be physically secure, not shared with some 'civilian commercial venture'.

By golly, the government can't do business if it isn't a datacenter operations company, a software vendor, and a car manufacturer.

> By golly, the government can't do business if it isn't a datacenter operations company, a software vendor, and a car manufacturer.

I mean, precisely, which is why some countries are rapidly turning into failed states. Too much buck-passing and outsourcing.

It isn't? AWS is crazy expensive and you don't have as much control over things as you may occasionally need. The best decision we took in the past few years with regards to infrastructure was moving away from AWS and doing everything ourselves.

On RDS we had inexplicable spikes in cost, deteriorating support and no real support for any of our issues. When we tried using DMS, it just didn't work as expected, even after spending two days on the phone with their support.

> is hiring experts

'moving to AWS' (or any cloud provider) is not 'hiring experts' it's just outsourcing the risk to an entity that you, in the event of a genuine crisis, have no leverage over beyond 'we're going to stop paying you (once we migrate away from you which will take ten years)'

AWS are not experts at providing computing services? Holy cow. This is news to me! I thought they were the most popular and highly regarded computing infrastructure and PaaS company in the world, managing both hardware and software and providing subject matter experts to work with customers on architecture and implementation, along with official partners and a marketplace of turn-key products.

Boy, am I embarrassed! I need to start building my own datacenter right away, all my shit is on AWS!!!

They may be experts, but you sure aren't hiring them. You are renting something from them.