If you have a small project and you only need one or two RDS databases in production, stick with RDS. The cost isn't that high and you save a ton in aggravation

If you have a small project and you only need one or two RDS databases in production, stick with RDS. The cost isn't that high and you save a ton in aggravation. Yes you need to set up separate monitoring, firewalling, etc. but it's really not a big deal. When you start to have dozens or hundreds of databases in production, and developers asking "I need Postgres in production, why can't I just click a button and get a Postgres instance for my service in production?" then scaling the monitoring and firewalling gets a little more complicated. Hooking into standard Kubernetes monitoring and service meshes can really help to simplify things.