Your DBA will be glad that you're using RDS

I have only had good experiences in working with AWS support. I will admit that my experience comes from the benefit of having a premium tier of support but even working with free-tier accounts I have not had problems getting help with AWS products when needed. And most often, the docs do a pretty good job of explaining how to operate a service so a quick spin through the docs has been useful in solving problems.

RDS is well suited for application environments where the developers don't have time to worry about the database. If the application requires a DB that is "fire and forget," RDS can be a rock solid implementation. This is particularly true for teams that may not have DBA resources or don't have a team member with extensive database admin skills. With some basic understanding, teams can stand up a DB in RDS and move on to the task of developing and maintaining the applications that use the DB.

RDS may be less appropriate for high performance applications where every level of the systems needs to be finely tuned. On the one hand, a novice developer may be able to get the required performance by scaling up to a large instance size while a proficient DBA could get the same performance from a finely tuned database running on an EC2 instance where access to the OS is available.

Pricing might also be a factor against RDS for teams that have limited budgets. Again, higher performing DB instances might be priced slightly more than the same DB running on a stand-alone server.