It’s also the pain AWS sales is pounding on IT teams that want to switch with a „too good to be true offer“ and some steak dinners with your c-suite and you have to suffer through endless meetings with „specialists“ that are everything but.

There are plenty of reasons to stay with AWS, RDS being one. Are there viable alternatives?

There are lots of alternatives for database solutions with Kubernetes, in Hopsworks we use RonDB which is highly available and has a MySQL interface but also supports a REST API and even a prototype Redis service.

I recently saw that Exascale, a Swiss provider, has something comparable, albeit afaik not autoscaling to the extent that Aurora is for example.

You are talking about Exoscale DBAAS, here: https://community.exoscale.com/community/dbaas/

(I work there.)

There's gazillion valid managed DB offers.

not cheaper than rds

First time I hear someone claim RDS is cheap. What specifications do you have in mind?

Scaleway costs approximately 51 % less, looking at on-demand postgresql instance with 8 GB RAM (db.t3.large vs. db-dev-l).

https://aws.amazon.com/rds/postgresql/pricing/?pg=pr&loc=3

https://www.scaleway.com/en/pricing/managed-databases/#cost-...

I guess I am saying it's a good value more than its raw price being less than other offerings.

The blue/green deploys, auto snapshotting, failover, upgrades, few-click resizing, etc justify the price vs running database servers (for me). I spend a lot of time looking for money in aws and never consider replacing RDS with anything else.

Theyve both done a really good job of following a similar vendor lock-in strategy to oracle as well as using their salespeople to scare the shit out of timid, risk averse execs over things like security and compliance.

This is how their market power was built - with FUD, lies and tricks. Theyve now gotten to the point where theyre comfortable enough with this market power that they can lean on it while pursuing a strategy of developer wage compression.

These are not excuses, but actual reasons: Lambda, S3, DynamoDB and many other cloud-native things.

But sure, if you're just renting ec2 resources and rearchitecturing is not feasible, AWS is probably a bad idea.