These comments:

    > He didn’t believe it was possible to have this kind of performance in a “legacy monolithic” (his words) application.

    > I think it’s so heavily ingrained in most cloud/web developers that this is the only option that they will not even entertain the thought that it can be done another way.

Hell, the amount of work that an OLD 1U can do is absurd. I have 3x Dell R620s (circa-2012), and when equipped with NVMe drives, they match the newest RDS instances, and blow Aurora out of the water.

I’ve tested this repeatedly, at multiple companies, with Postgres and MySQL. Everyone thinks Aurora must be faster because AWS is pushing it so hard; in fact, it’s quite slow. Hard to get around physics. My drives are mounted via Ceph over Infiniband, and have latency measured in microseconds. Aurora (and RDS for that matter) has to traverse much longer physical distances to talk to its drives.

It's nice to think about the amount of work done by game engines, for instance. Factorio is a nice example, or anything graphics-heavy.