55 engineers on Hacker News describe using Amazon RDS first-hand: 10 endorse it, 7 regret it, 4 are mixed.
“we use RDS for our app DB, because their performance profiles and uptime guarantees are more than acceptable for the price we pay”
endorse · production · scott_w · 2025-12-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Whenever we have to do any type of AWS Aurora or RDS cluster modification in prod we always have the entire emergency response crew standing by”
regret · production · CaptainKanuk · 2025-11-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“RDS (for example) has given us something like one unexplained 15-minute outage in the last six years.”
endorse · production · 6 yr · TheFlyingFish · 2024-12-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“RDS is expensive, bandwidth is crazy etc.”
regret · production · tschellenbach · 2024-11-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Sometimes depending on revision you won't get the logs and other times the log line is emitted twice based on the internal RDS consistency checks.”
regret · production · TechIsCool · 2023-12-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Turns out writes from RDS to S3 always use the S3 managed key, no one cares about my aws_s3_bucket_server_side_encryption_configuration.”
regret · production · efxhoy · 2023-05-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We tested out RDS Postgres, but that would've literally tripled our cost for worse performance.”
regret · personal · sgtfrankieboy · 2022-09-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“After we migrated it to aws rds we could just spin up new dbs from snapshots.”
endorse · production · shoo · 2021-02-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Have had mixed results with the other services, even with things like RDS you have to do a lot of tuning and backup / DR work yourself.”
mixed · production · blabitty · 2021-01-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We migrated again to RDS postgres, and bumping the provisioned IOPs up we had equivalent performance (possibly better?) for half the price”
endorse · production · mijoharas · 2020-11-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“not having to worry about the operational aspects of our datastore was great. ... Many extensions cannot be installed”
mixed · production · Znafon · 2019-11-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“before we moved to an early version of RDS. Add replication across regions into the mix and things swing even further in favor of AWS.”
endorse · production · griffordson · 2019-01-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I love RDS as a product. We actually do use RDS for a number of our services... The amount of data we store is at the point where RDS is too expensive for us.”
mixed · production · malisper · 2018-09-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using it for a few years and for my use-case it's great.”
endorse · production · 3 yr · gtsteve · 2017-11-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Then we switched to RDS... Sure it was a few hundred dollars more per month in AWS fees but we saved thousands a month in consulting fees.”
endorse · production · throwaway2016a · 2017-11-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“You still have to tune the configuration of RDS instances, and they can make some administrative tasks more difficult because they don't grant SUPER”
regret · production · cookiecaper · 2016-04-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“RDS is a great service and you should stick with it as long as you can”
endorse · production · cachemiss · 2015-12-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“In my experience (a few years ago though), RDS was absolutely terrible for high performance and/or latency sensitive write workloads.”
regret · production · 3 yr · stock_toaster · 2015-10-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“You can just use RDS m1.smalls then. We have databases that are 20-40GB running off smalls with relatively high throughput”
endorse · production · Xorlev · 2014-11-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“it can be a headache to find problematic queries in my RDS instance even with tools like NewRelic”
mixed · production · numlocked · 2014-08-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We're using it in production in service we just launched. ... Minimal amount of time to maintain (none)”
endorse · production · josephruscio · 2010-05-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we replaced pinecone and rds with neon under the hood”
neutral · production · kencho · 2026-03-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we've moved to RDS with license included to avoid the direct relationship with Oracle”
neutral · production · thedougd · 2025-12-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“speaking as a DBRE who has used both MySQL and Postgres, RDS and Aurora in production”
neutral · production · sgarland · 2025-11-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“substitute Docker containers for RDS and MinIO for S3”
neutral · production · 18nleung · 2025-10-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“For us, we run 2 stacks. One that basically cannot/should-not be deleted/refactored. VPC, RDS, critical S3 buckets”
neutral · production · irjustin · 2024-11-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We have MySQL/MariaDB in RDS”
neutral · production · jonsnow_dba · 2023-04-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“running our backing services (RDS, Elasticsearch, Memcached, Redis) on AWS despite doing compute on Heroku”
neutral · production · geoffharcourt · 2022-10-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We run a few services across 4 different environments. I'd like to have a single place to view metrics... metrics related to RDS”
neutral · production · xwowsersx · 2022-09-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“RDS for postgres. Elasticache redis. Opensearch for ES.”
neutral · production · efxhoy · 2022-08-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“my table (which lives on RDS or Aurora btw) is less of a target than Okta's users tables”
neutral · production · jaeming · 2022-07-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“plus durable storage in RDS, EFS, and S3, to a single dedicated box at OVH”
neutral · production · mwcampbell · 2022-02-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We're looking at nearly a 50% cost reduction versus the current m5 RDS and other EC2 instances.”
neutral · production · InvaderFizz · 2021-12-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Every now and then we discuss moving DBs to AWS RDS (or equivalent) however for our transaction volume RDS costs are prohibitive.”
neutral · production · rafaelturk · 2021-10-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we had this massive Pg database running in RDS. It did not scale.”
neutral · production · mxz3000 · 2021-10-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I run a few other containers to give me the equivalent of the prod environment, RDS (MySQL or PostgreSQL)”
neutral · production · mozey · 2021-04-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“In order to move to AWS RDS we had to recreate the functionality of temporal_tables”
neutral · production · Codesleuth · 2021-04-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“someone deleted the production RDS and all the snapshots.”
neutral · production · txutxu · 2020-10-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“in prod we run all of our stateful components outside K8s (generally using things like RDS and ElastiCache).”
neutral · production · beefsack · 2020-06-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we were on RDS's highest instance and growing, with jobs mutating the data taking a less and less excusable amount of time.”
neutral · production · rudyrigot · 2020-05-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I was hosting my personal website on EC2 with an RDS instance and it cost around $20/month.”
neutral · personal · ordinaryperson · 2019-09-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“different RDS instance sizes for staging vs. production”
neutral · production · dmlittle · 2018-12-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Databases are PostgreSQL in AWS RDS with Liquibase used for migrations.”
neutral · production · karmakaze · 2018-12-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“For database, we use RDS/Dynamodb”
neutral · production · InGodsName · 2018-12-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“as in the RDS world support became 'free' as we were already paying for AWS support”
neutral · production · wftglf · 2018-12-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We've been using Postgres on RDS for years and were considering moving to Aurora.”
neutral · production · kurttheviking · 2017-12-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“store all our shared "environment configuration data", e.g., name of RDS for services in prod environment”
neutral · production · howinator · 2017-08-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we rely heavily on ECS, RDS and other managed services”
neutral · production · ekidd · 2016-11-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Your RDS containing the WP data is going to be shared though”
neutral · production · rmccue · 2016-11-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we migrated to RDS in 2012”
neutral · production · 4 yr · dfsegoat · 2016-09-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“It's also subject to the usual limitations of RDS (no SUPER, no access to the binary database files, no innobackupex).”
neutral · production · cookiecaper · 2016-09-03 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we run MYSQL RDS in production with two AZ enabled, we pay x2 the prices”
neutral · production · dk8996 · 2014-11-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I generally use MySQL or PostgreSQL on RDS (AWS) given DBA's are hard to find.”
neutral · production · nielskrijger · 2014-10-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use amazon rds but that's the only thing we have to setup if we want a new environment.”
neutral · production · ollysb · 2013-11-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“At my previous job we used Sybase SQL Anywhere (horrible, wouldn't recommend it), Microsoft SQL server, MySQL, Amazon RDS and H2.”
neutral · production · martinp · 2012-11-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?