The DBaaS you wish RDS was.
Rest easy knowing your database is in the hands of the people who built it. Support modern workloads with a database that is inherently resilient, performant, and reliable — without the operational overhead RDS puts on your team.
It’s a managed database. Why are you still on call?
You chose RDS to get out of the weeds. But RDS manages infrastructure, not consequences. When failover takes two minutes, when a forced upgrade hijacks your quarter, when CPU maxes out and you can’t resize without downtime — that’s still yours to own.
“RDS failover triggered. DNS propagation in progress. ETA unknown. Customers reporting errors.”
RDS DNS-based failover takes 60–120 seconds — minimum. You’re awake, watching a timer tick while the incident channel fills up, because a passive standby can’t take over instantly.
“Major version EOL in 90 days. All teams: migration testing begins next sprint. Feature freeze starts Monday.”
RDS runs community MySQL/MariaDB with a 3-year EOL cycle. Every few years, your roadmap gets hijacked by a high-risk, high-toil forced upgrade — not because your app needed it, but because the community schedule did.
“Primary CPU at 98%. Read replicas falling behind. Some queries returning stale data. Can we scale?”
RDS autoscales storage. CPU and RAM are fixed until you resize — which causes downtime. Meanwhile replica lag compounds under load, and your app is serving answers from 30 seconds ago.
“We need vector search for the new RAG pipeline. How long to provision and connect a separate service?”
Every new workload on RDS means another service to provision, connect, and maintain. Vector search, analytics, transactions — each one adds another failure point, another bill line, more complexity to deal with.
Fix the four problems RDS can’t.
MariaDB Cloud runs in your existing AWS environment — same infrastructure, radically better database behavior.
Escape the EOL treadmill
Stop fighting 3-year EOL cycles. MariaDB’s up to 8-year enterprise lifecycle means you set your own upgrade schedule — and spend your time shipping features, not firefighting forced migrations.
No more single-primary bottlenecks
Every node is active. Scale both reads and writes across the cluster simultaneously — no stale replica lag, no primary bottleneck at peak traffic.
Failover your app doesn’t notice
RDS DNS-based failover takes 1–2 minutes. MariaDB’s transparent HA uses always-active replicas for instant recovery — no dropped connections, no manual intervention, no incident channel.
Compute that actually autoscales
RDS autoscales storage. MariaDB autoscales CPU and RAM dynamically — handle traffic spikes without pre-provisioning headroom or dropping connections under load.
What the architecture actually looks like.
Same AWS environment. Very different behavior under pressure.
| MariaDB Cloud | RDS | |
|---|---|---|
| Failover | Transparent HA: always-active replicas. Sub-second recovery. App sees no interruption. | DNS TTL-based. 60–120s recovery window. App must handle reconnection logic. |
| Scaling | Dynamic compute: CPU and RAM scale on-demand. No resize, no downtime, no dropped connections. | Autoscales storage only. CPU/RAM require instance resize — causes downtime. |
| Replication | Active-active clustering: every node handles reads and writes. Zero lag. Linear write throughput as you scale. | Single-primary with read replicas. Write bottleneck at primary. Replica lag under load. |
| Version lifecycle | 8-year enterprise lifecycle: hardened enterprise binaries. Direct access to the engineers who wrote the code. | 3-year EOL. Forced major version upgrades with community binaries — tested in production by you. |
Your complete database operations layer.
From first deploy to global scale — without stitching together half a dozen AWS services.
Deploy
Choose your cloud and region. Launch a hardened enterprise instance in under 60 seconds. SSL, private connections, and load balancing are live from the moment you deploy — zero config required.
Enterprise binary. Not community.
Scale
Go from a single instance to a global, active-active deployment without re-architecting. MariaDB Cloud handles topology, replication, and connection routing. You stay focused on the product.
Active-active. Cross-region. Cross-cloud.
Monitor
Full observability with custom alerts and query-level logs. Plus MariaDB’s Remote DBAs perform proactive health checks — so you stop triaging incidents and start preventing them.
Remote DBA coverage. 24×7.
Evolve
Run transactions, analytics, and vector/RAG workloads on a single platform. No Lambda glue, no separate Aurora clusters, no data sync headaches. One connection string, every workload.
OLTP + HTAP + Vector. Native.
“As soon as we migrated, all of the failed connections we’d experienced previously disappeared.”
30M+ subscribers. Sub-second authorization. Zero tolerance for downtime. MariaDB Cloud delivered.
7ms –> 1ms
Authorization latency
99.995%
Uptime with 24×7 proactive monitoring
Zero
Failed connections
post-migration
MariaDB Cloud vs Amazon RDS for
MariaDB and MySQL
A comparison of two managed cloud database services for AWS.
The truth about hyperscaler DBaaS
high availability
A live, side-by-side crash test of standard RDS vs. state-preserving architecture. See the difference under load.
Stop paying for air: most cloud database spend is wasted
Business continuity with MariaDB: beyond the checkbox
When disaster strikes: a guide to true multi-region DR
Ready to stop working around RDS?
Talk to one of our MariaDB solutions engineers. We’ll walk through your current setup and show you exactly
what the migration looks like — schema, downtime risk, and all.