Fancy would be writing an application to talk to RDS, creating an RDS instance, creating a database, creating whatever IAM link is needed for auth into the db so you don't need a second set of credentials, creating a schema, creating columns with different data types, and then modifying the application to handle edge cases for the different data types, logic to insert, update, delete rows, select items, yadda yadda yadda.
This comment is unnecessarily antagonistic, and you are consistently and willfully missing all the points in your replies.
He could have set up a more complex architecture and paid much more in hosting costs over the years to overengineer the solution. What would the benefits be? It might have avoided this one outage or saved a few hours restoring the data. The drawbacks? Much more time developing and maintaining the solution and higher subscription costs for users.
The solutions you are familiar with and comfortable with are perfectly valid. But you are falling into the trap of thinking "what I'm familiar with and comfortable with is the only valid answer and everyone else is wrong and stupid".
Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36897868 and please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN. Regardless of how right you are / how much smarter you are or feel you are, it's exactly what the rules here ask you not to do. We're trying for a very different quality of conversation here.
I'm only wildly guessing here, but most likely the "cloud storage" backing all those managed databases is actually S3-like blob storage under the hood.
