1. Rare, and easy to avoid, even if using Aurora. Anything without "Aurora" in the name is a plain database engine with no Amazon customization (e.g., PostgreSQ

1. Rare, and easy to avoid, even if using Aurora. Anything without "Aurora" in the name is a plain database engine with no Amazon customization (e.g., PostgreSQL). 2. Not correct, IAM authentication is not the preferred connection method, and it has a performance limit of 200 connections per second. It's intended for access by humans and not by your applications. In my experience I've never seen any organization set it up. The other authentication methods are not AWS specific (Kerberos/password auth). Easy to avoid. 3. Most performance features of RDS have some kind of non-AWS equivalent. AWS isn't reinventing the wheel as a database host.