A true read replica won't let you write! So if you need to test something like a backfill and see if anything goes wrong you wouldn't be able to quite as easily.

We'd let you instantly clone prod + user defined auto-anonymization so you can test writes. The architecture also somewhat takes the place of an existing read replica if you want to use it like that to make it more cost efficient.

Also since we're using copy on write for the clones they're incredibly storage efficient and the autoscaling compute helps minimize cost on clones by minimizing excess compute uptime

> A true read replica won't let you write!

I mean, they said "read-only" ...

Ardent adds extra dependencies and cost.