> Also, pedantically, you can run RDS on bare metal with local NVMEs.

Only if you like your data to evaporate when the server stops.

I'm relatively sure that the processing power and memory you can buy on OVH / Hetzner / co. is larger and cheaper even if you take into account peaks in your usage patterns.

> Only if you like your data to evaporate when the server stops.

(Edited to remove glib and vague rejoinder, sorry) Then hibernate/reboot it instead of stopping it? Alternatively, that’s what backup-to S3, periodic snapshot-to-EBS, clustering, or running an EBS-persisted zero-query-volume tiny replica are for.

> the processing power and memory you can buy on OVH / Hetzner / co. is larger and cheaper

Cheaper? Yeah, generally. But larger/more performant? Not always—it’s not about peaks/autoscaling, it’s about the (large) minority of workloads that will work better on RDS/Aurora/Serverless: auto-scale-out makes the reports run on time regardless of cost; bulk data loads are available on replicas a lot sooner on Aurora because the storage is the replication system, not the WAL; and so on—if you add up all the situations where the hosted RDBMS systems trump self hosted, you get an amount that’s not “hosted is always better/worth it”, but it’s not “hosted is just ops time savings and is otherwise just slower/more expensive” either. And that’s before you add reliability into the conversation.