On the “Amazon can just offer your DB as a service” Yes this can happen. But a lot of people don’t want a AWS managed service. They're like 30% cheaper for 30%

On the “Amazon can just offer your DB as a service” Yes this can happen. But a lot of people don’t want a AWS managed service. They're like 30% cheaper for 30% less value. They can develop a bad reputation and feel like weird forks (kinesis vs Kafka) that have weird undocumented gotchas and edge cases that never get fixed. Many teams want to host on k8s anyway, and you’ll probably have better k8s support from the main project. Another example is the success of Flink over hosted Google Dataflow. Seems eventually the teams I know trend to the most mainstream OSS implementation over time, maybe after early prototyping on a managed system. IMO it might not be the highest growth market anymore. Those who want to pay for a managed service will. But many are just figuring out a k8s based solution to their infra needs as k8s knowledge becomes more ubiquitous.