Amazon RDS
Shares rank 11 of 15 managed databases by recommenders
People recommend it as a near zero-maintenance managed database with automatic recovery, so teams avoid running their own; critics find it costly, slower than self-hosting, and restrictive.
People recommend it as a near zero-maintenance managed database with automatic recovery, so teams avoid running their own; critics find it costly, slower than self-hosting, and restrictive.
15 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 6
- criticize it
- 9
- approval share
- 40%
Recommended in 5 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 6 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 0.6 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 5 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Little database maintenance needed
“RDS + EKS for a couple hundred a month is an amazing deal for what is essentially zero maintenance application hosting”
Comment from 19 Nov 2025 in “A $1k AWS mistake” “I have no intention of managing my own DB and the insanity that comes with that.”
Comment from 26 Jan 2026 in “You can just port things to Cloudflare Workers”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Weaker performance than self-hosted
“AWS RDS is about 10x more expensive than bare metal with maybe 1/4th the disk performance”
Comment from 27 Jan 2026 in “France Aiming to Replace Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc.” “"Tuned" AWS instance is not impressive comparing it with”
Comment from 7 Jul 2026 in “PostgreSQL Benchmark: AWS RDS vs. Self-Hosted on Hetzner (2026)” “Uses t4 burst instances in AWS, shared CPU in Hetzner.”
Comment from 7 Jul 2026 in “PostgreSQL Benchmark: AWS RDS vs. Self-Hosted on Hetzner (2026)” Limits database design and extensions
“they limit your options for how you want to design your database architecture”
Comment from 20 Dec 2025 in “Go ahead, self-host Postgres” “you're not able to use the extensions you want”
Comment from 28 Apr 2026 in “Pgrx: Build Postgres Extensions with Rust”
Other managed databases people recommend
The four most recommended other managed databases, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon RDS | 50 | 43 | 54% | 11 | — | — |
| Neon Postgres | 48 | 10 | 83% | 12 | — | Approved |
| DynamoDB | 46 | 31 | 60% | 11 | — | — |
| Cloudflare D1 | 36 | 30 | 55% | 10 | — | — |
| Amazon RDSThis page | 6 | 9 | 40% | 5 | — | — |
What people said
15 of the 16 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Dev or Staging should be end to end testing against AWS RDS”
“Unless this use case is warned against in migration notes, I would think they ought to.”
“Uses t4 burst instances in AWS, shared CPU in Hetzner.”
“"Tuned" AWS instance is not impressive comparing it with”
“just using fargate or rds whatever”
“you're not able to use the extensions you want”
“all of the magic "I don't have to think about it" stuff dies with the DB.”
“AWS RDS is about 10x more expensive than bare metal with maybe 1/4th the disk performance”
“I just migrated this weekend our database from AWS RDS to a Hetzner VPS”
“I have no intention of managing my own DB and the insanity that comes with that.”
“I moved from AWS RDS to ScaleWay RDS”
“they limit your options for how you want to design your database architecture”
“AWS support couldn't determine what was wrong with an RDS cluster and advised us to "try restarting it"”
“RDS + EKS for a couple hundred a month is an amazing deal for what is essentially zero maintenance application hosting”
“recovery is generally automatic within minutes”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.