Any maintenance happens in the maintenance window you specify, you could enable performance insights and/or enhanced monitoring on rds https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/USER_Monitoring.OS.html And to answer the question - yep, super mega quite kinda nice really reliable. More on reddit.com

I mean if your goal is to learn about how a database works, no I wouldn't use RDS. The whole point of RDS is you don't really have to worry about how the database is hosted and managed in the backend, you just have to worry about your data. More on reddit.com

If you’ve never managed bare metal, especially in a hybrid cloud/on-prem fashion, now is not the time. It would be better to get off RDS and run a Postgres ec2 cluster. More on reddit.com

Relational databases should be your first choice always, until performance dictates otherwise. All the NOSQL database make sacrifices in order to get higher speed. If you've ever used Cassandra, you'll know that write speeds are extremely fast, but the query is extremely specific. You can't do random queries on Cassandra, they'll usually timeout unless it's a subquery of a supported query. It's also great for sharding large amounts of data. So it works better than relational databases for very specific circumstances. Same goes for MongoDB or Redis that requires all data to be in memory. You may very well need to make these sacrifices in order to get the performance or scaling that you need. But you should always start with RDB because it will handle everything up until you get to the size when you need to switch strategies to a NOSQL. More on reddit.com