Don’t Use ‘T’ RDS Instance Types For Production

Note to self: when choosing an instance type for a production PostgreSQL database in Amazon RDS or Amazon Aurora, don’t choose any of the ‘T’ classes.

The reason is that the ‘T’ classes work on CPU credits, and if you have a sustained performance for a long period of time, those credits will be consumed and your database CPU will be throttled down to 10%.

Instead, consider one of the other instances. An ‘R’ instance is a good one to choose if you’re workload is expected to be constant. Keep the ‘T’ instances for the test environments, where the workload is naturally burstable and costs are to be kept down.