https://www.instantdb.com/essays/pg_upgrade This is the downside of not being familiar with relational databases (and PostgreSQL in particular) basic administration at any kind of respectable level. RDS and Aurora are cool services, but you might have saved a bunch of money and avoided a lot of pain if you had invested some time in your education.There is nothing scary about administrating and managing self-hosted PostgreSQL, and you need only 1-2 months of studying documentation and free courses online. Outcome -> invaluable skills. This kind of article keeps being released from different teams yearly (The COOL STORY how we replicated and switched over database in AWS). I might have been lucky having one of my first jobs in database administration and support centric company, but aren't IT people interested in how databases work? At least from a software perspective. This is a treasure trove of fundamental computer science and software engineering topics - the more you dig, the deeper it gets.