Lack of local storage is a fair criticism. I understand balancing reliability with performance but there's some more middle ground like allowing NVMe storage on

Lack of local storage is a fair criticism. I understand balancing reliability with performance but there's some more middle ground like allowing NVMe storage on replicas but not the primary. I don't know much about the MySQL variant. Aurora isn't open source but I'm also not sure there's a compelling reason. It's highly reliant on AWS ability to run massive scale storage systems that amortize the IO cost across tons of physical devices (their proprietary SAN). If you have dedicated staff, managed services are definitely less compelling. We have 2 infrastructure engineers to run 15+ platforms so we're definitely getting a lot of leverage out of managed services. We'd have to 5x in size/cost to justify a specialist.