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> when you pay for a hot standby you can't use it as a read only replica (true for AWS

I'm not sure what you mean here. At least for MySQL you can have an instance configured as replica + read-only and used for reads. Aurora makes that automatic / transparent too with a separate read endpoint.

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A hot standby is not a read replica. It's a set of servers running in a different Availability zone mirroring current prod, that is configured to automatically fail over to if the primary is offline. It's been a few years since I personally set this up in AWS, but at the time, those servers were completely unavailable to me, and basically doubled the cost of my production servers.

The fact that a hot standby is usually in some sort of read-replica state prior to failing over is a technical detail that AWS sort of tries to abstract away I think.

They recently announced readable standby instances.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/readable-standby-insta...

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