Stay on AWS.
Stop overpaying with RDS.
You’ve invested in AWS — and that investment should work harder. MariaDB Cloud runs in your existing AWS environment, leverages your negotiated discounts, and replaces RDS’s structural inefficiencies with 8-year version stability, 99.995% availability, and up to 65% lower TCO.
RDS has a cost structure that compounds against you.
Your AWS environment is the right call. But RDS introduces a set of structural inefficiencies that quietly drain budget and pull your best engineers away from building product — inefficiencies that have nothing to do with AWS itself.
The over-provisioning trap
RDS forces you to provision for peak capacity you use 5% of the time — and pay for the other 95% just to avoid a crash. Every month.
The forced migration treadmill
RDS community server EOL cycles run just 3 years. Your team inherits the risk and toil of repeated major version upgrades — on RDS’s schedule, not yours.
The Redundancy Tax
To get “Production-Grade” availability, RDS requires a multi-availability zone deployment, which effectively doubles your bill. You’re paying 100% markup for a standby instance that sits idle.
MariaDB Cloud: more from your AWS investment.
MariaDB Cloud deploys directly into your AWS account — so you keep your infrastructure control, your security posture, and your negotiated AWS pricing. What changes is the database layer: more stable, more efficient, and engineered for the long term.
Pay for what you use
MariaDB Cloud comes with true autoscaling. Instead of paying for 100% capacity just to survive a 5% spike, the architecture automatically scales resources to match your traffic demands.
8-year support lifecycles
Escape the 3-year forced upgrade cycle. Enterprise-grade binaries — not community builds — give your team a stable foundation and let you upgrade on your own timeline.
100% hardware utilization
Active-active clustering means every node processes real traffic. No idle standbys. No paying for capacity that sits dormant while your bill runs up.
99.995% SLA with cross-cloud resilience
Replicate across AWS, GCP, and Azure simultaneously. Your business stays online even in the event of a provider-level incident — not just a zone failure.
Deploy in your AWS account — your control, your discounts
MariaDB Cloud runs inside your own AWS environment. Your data never leaves your perimeter, your security team stays in control, and you leverage your existing AWS committed spend and negotiated rates — so the TCO savings are immediate.
| Financial factor | RDS | MariaDB Cloud on AWS |
|---|---|---|
| Hardware ROI | Pay for standby nodes that process zero traffic | Every node works. Every node is your backup. |
| Operational cost | High internal headcount for manual tuning and upgrades | Remote DBA experts act as a force multiplier for your team |
| Scaling model | Over-provisioned peak capacity, billed 24/7 | True elasticity — pay for consumption, with scale-to-zero |
| Version lifecycle | 3-year EOL forces extended support fees and migrations | 8-year enterprise lifecycle — extends time between major version upgrades |
| AWS negotiated pricing | Leverage negotiated AWS rates | BYOA: deploy in your account and apply your negotiated AWS rates directly |
| Workload consolidation | Separate services for transactions, analytics and AI | One platform: transactions, analytics and native vector/AI built in |
“As soon as we migrated, all of the failed connections we’d experienced previously disappeared.”
Virgin Media O2 needed sub-second authorization for 30M+ subscribers. They didn’t just find stability — they accelerated.
7ms –> 1ms
Authorization latency
99.995%
Uptime with 24×7 proactive monitoring
Significant
CapEx and OpEx savings
Find out what RDS is really costing you.
Use these resources to pressure-test your current architecture against what’s actually possible on AWS.
The hidden cost of RDS
A detailed breakdown of where your database budget is quietly leaking — and how to recover it without leaving 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
Let’s find what RDS is costing you.
Book a discovery call with one of our experts.
We’ll analyze your current RDS footprint and show you exactly what a more optimized setup looks like — in your AWS account, on your timeline.