I am looking for some guidance on database hosting with AWS.

I currently have 7 RDS instances running PostgreSQL. 3 in US, 3 in EU and 1 in Australia.

Each RDS instance has around 3,000 databases on them, most of them are small.

Since the upgrade cycle for PostgreSQL on RDS is quite aggressive, we are forced to upgrade each RDS on an annual basis. This process is currently quite cumbersome as it requires exporting each database from the old RDS, in turn, and importing it into a brand new PostgreSQL on RDS on the new version. This is clearly prone to error and requires a lot of babysitting.

I am investigating into the benefits of Aurora and in particular if blue/green deployments with Aurora would be a good option.

In-place PostgreSQL major version upgrades on RDS for 3,000 is a non-starter as it takes around 7 hours which is downtime we cannot wear.

Is anyone willing to share the upgrade experiences with PostgreSQL on Aurora for major engine versions?

AWS just checked the expired credit card associated with my account & asked me to update the default payment method.

Can I ignore it & just let it suspend the account in due course? My monthly spend is $0.00 currently.

As a long time AWS user (over 15 years) I’m nearing the point of being done. AWS support isn’t support anymore, and getting access to anything requires near TAM level support plans. I don’t think they remember what businesses got them to where they are today (hint: it wasn’t enterprise customers). Access to just about any models via Bedrock is hopeless. I get errors that are about sales, not even quotas, but there is no way to fix it. Support doesn’t answer and when they do it’s automated and irrelevant to what was asked. Mind you, these aren’t even new accounts. No, they don’t spend much, but they have been around for several years in most cases, and the org has been around for at least six years. I don’t get how I am supposed to use it anymore, much less recommend others do so.

I got a +$1 and -$1 charge on my credit card from AWS, and I haven't made any changes on my AWS free tier account, and also haven't been using it. I'm not sure if they're just regularly checking if my card is still valid, or if my credit card has been compromised.

I only used AWS 4 years ago and haven't touched it since. I got charged just now; is someone trying to use my credit card for the service?

An overly permissive IAM policy and a persona-based AI prompt fail the same way. Both technically grant enough access to get the job done, both leave the actual boundaries undefined, and both work fine until something inside that wide-open scope does something you didn't intend and nothing was there to stop it.

Tested this on a Lambda cold-start optimization task. "Act as a senior AWS engineer, optimize this function for cold starts" came back with generally reasonable suggestions, bundle size trimming, provisioned concurrency mentioned in passing, nothing wrong exactly. Swapped it for explicit constraints instead, only suggest changes that don't require new IAM permissions, flag anything that would increase memory allocation, don't touch the VPC config, output changes as a numbered list with expected cold-start impact for each. Same task, noticeably more targeted output, because the model wasn't inferring what a "senior engineer" would prioritize anymore, it was executing against a defined scope.

Least privilege exists because "trust the role to behave reasonably" doesn't scale as a security model. Same logic seems to apply to prompts once the task has real constraints attached, actual stack limitations, actual things that shouldn't change. A persona is * on the resource. An explicit list of what to check and what not to touch is the policy that actually says what's allowed.

Hey everyone!

​AI is awesome for helping us jump into cloud stuff, but I just had a funny little learning moment I wanted to share.

​I was experimenting with AWS using some AI-generated code. What I didn't realize was that the AI told AWS to save a backup snapshot every single time I deleted my testing database. I looked at my account today and found 14 hidden snapshots just hanging out and quietly charging me.

​Thankfully it was only a tiny $1.50 leak, so no big deal, but it's a great reminder: Always double-check your templates before deploying, and definitely set billing alarms just in case!