Performance tuning, scaling, troubleshooting, etc. We had terabytes of active data (as opposed to warehoused data). For example, if a disk fills or is fails, a

Performance tuning, scaling, troubleshooting, etc. We had terabytes of active data (as opposed to warehoused data). For example, if a disk fills or is fails, adding a disk to a mySQL setup without causing downtime is a pretty involved process but in RDS it is one config change in the admin. It does the same process just AWS put a huge amount of work into automating it. We only brought in the consultant for an average of a day every other week but that adds up and we had to bring in 0 people after switching to RDS.