Fantastic comment, thank you so much. I've been following Aurora for a while but a little curious (and skeptical) about sharp edges vs vanilla PG. If I may ask you a follow-on question, who do you think Aurora would be the right fit for?
The performance was great, I can't complain about it, but the unpredictable (and high) price was the issue.
In terms of aurora I think it probably can scale better to much larger workloads. If we put the time in and dug in and optimised any queries that could touch a large number of blocks (we do well, but I'm sure there are queries that have some seq scans somewhere in our codebase) then the price wouldn't have been an issue, and we'd happily have stayed with it.
In addition, we have a single large master and one replica. with my understanding of aurora's architecture, and how the storage is separated from the "postgres" instance, it could possibly do a lot better with drastically different architectures with a lot of different smaller "postgres" instances. We didn't have time to investigate many other architectures and in the end moving to RDS felt safest (didn't want to spend too much time when we could be building core features)
Hope that answers your question! Some of the above is more an educated guess with a smattering of experience so please treat it as such.
On the other hand, vanilla postgres is very powerful, and you shouldn't underestimate how much you can win by cranking up the PIOPs for an RDS postgres instance.
