Well, just a few weeks ago we weren't able to connect to RDS for several hours. That's way more downtime than we ever had at the company I worked for 10 years ago, where the DB was just running on a computer in the basement.
Most software doesn’t need to be distributed. But it’s the growth paradigm where we build everything on principles that can scale to world-wide low-latency accessibility.
A UNIX pipe gets replaced with a $1200/mo. maximum IOPS RDS channel, bandwidth not included in price. Vendor lock-in guaranteed.
Multi-AZ RDS is 100% higher availability than me managing something.