Given that they're an analytics company, they probably have 2 problems with using Aurora/RDS.
Note that these are educated guesses from their statement: "Heap’s data is stored in a Postgres cluster running on i3 instances in EC2. These are machines with large amounts of NVMe storage—they’re rated at up to 3 million IOPS, perfect for high transaction volume database use cases"
1. Aurora charges per-request ($0.20/million). Given that analytics comes with tons of events and that they wanted servers that have up to 3 million IOPS, it can get pricey fast.
2. RDS has database instances that have SSDs that provide "up to 40,000 IOPS" per instance in their provisioned case, which is probably not enough.
Note that these are educated guesses from their statement: "Heap’s data is stored in a Postgres cluster running on i3 instances in EC2. These are machines with large amounts of NVMe storage—they’re rated at up to 3 million IOPS, perfect for high transaction volume database use cases"
1. Aurora charges per-request ($0.20/million). Given that analytics comes with tons of events and that they wanted servers that have up to 3 million IOPS, it can get pricey fast.
2. RDS has database instances that have SSDs that provide "up to 40,000 IOPS" per instance in their provisioned case, which is probably not enough.