Oracle counts a vCPU the same way on EC2 and on RDS, so the platform choice never saves you licensing money. What it does change is sysdba access, block size and file limits, who owns backups and failover, and the Multi-AZ setting that quietly doubles your BYOL count.
Pool timeouts while RDS sits at low CPU? The database isn't the bottleneck. Here's how to tell whether your app pool, max_connections or RDS Proxy ran out, the SQL that proves it, and the fixes that survive the next deploy.
The assessment report grades syntax, not behavior. A four-tier breakdown of what AWS SCT converts cleanly, what it converts while silently changing meaning, what it only handles through the extension pack, what it refuses outright, and the whole category it never looks at.
Latency charts don't decide this. The query nobody wrote down at the start does. How to build an access pattern inventory, where DynamoDB and RDS each genuinely win and hurt, a six-question decision procedure, and the arguments on both sides that fall apart under a real workload.