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Amazon RDS for MariaDB vs MariaDB on EC2: the decision cheat sheet.

Both run in your own AWS account. The choice comes down to what you pay, how much say you want over replication and recovery, and who runs the database day to day. This sheet puts the numbers and the trade-offs on five pages, worked for a typical mid-size instance at AWS list prices, so you can map it onto your own bill whatever its size.

Your database line doesn't have to be $13,000 a month, as it was in the migration we wrote up, for the ratio to matter. If RDS is one of the bigger lines on your AWS bill, we'll review it and tell you what a move would save. That review stands on its own, whether or not you host with us.

• 2.2× RDS compute vs the same EC2 instance, list price
• $756 vs $352 a Multi-AZ pair per month, RDS vs EC2 (example)
• 83% real saving in the 500 GB migration we wrote up

What's inside

1. 01 What it costs Same r7g.xlarge, on-demand and committed, plus the Multi-AZ pair side by side.
2. 02 Replication, in plain terms Async, semi-sync and synchronous: data loss on failover, write penalty, where each lives.
3. 03 Multi-AZ, side by side How the standby keeps up, whether it serves reads, failover time, monthly cost.
4. 04 Which fits you Stay on RDS if… Move to EC2 if… Honest on both sides.
5. 05 Pros and cons Strengths and trade-offs of each, including what you take on when you leave RDS.
6. 06 Five questions before you decide Reservations, tolerable data loss, who gets the 3 a.m. alert, RDS-only features, the way back.
7. 07 If you move, make it reversible Five steps that keep RDS as a live fallback until you are sure.

The sheet's prices are AWS list prices for us-east-1 as of November 2026, for illustration. The real numbers, a database line that went from $13,581 to $2,326 a month, are in our field report, which the MariaDB Foundation republished on mariadb.org.