One of the applications that is a shoe-in candidate for migration has a smalltime usage profile.  We are talking 4 hits/day.  No big deal, it’s a business process consideration.

It needs to interface with enterprise data, resident in our Banner database.  No worries there, the data this app needs access to is decoupled via web services.  Now lets swing our attention to the apps transactional data storage requirements.

First question – does it need any of the Oracle-specific feature set?  No.  So, let’s not use Oracle – no need to further bind ourselves in that area.  Postgres is a reasonable alternative.

OK, so, RDS?  Yes please – no need to start administering an Postgres stack when all we want to do is use it.

Multiple availability zones?  Great question.  Fantastic question!  Glad you asked.

Consider the usage profile of this app.  4 records per day. 4.  Can the recovery point/time objectives be met with snapshotting?  Absolutely.  Is that more cost-effective than running a multi-AZ configuration?  Yes.

Does it make sense for this application?

Yes.

Thank you Amazon for providing a fantastic set of tools, and thank you to the #NDCloudFirst team for thinking through using those tools appropriately.