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.