Besides, crdb does worldwide SQL databases now, and the only competitor at that level is not Aurora, it is Google Cloud Spanner, at a much higher price range and with very limited options.
Once every top infra team at MS & Google realized they can be a saas/paaas revenue center, not just saving 1% in internal costs, that made the whole "Google for everyone else" VC funding wave feel like musical chairs.
It does feel like a good ("least bad") move given the environment. We have taken an "embrace" approach to using/contributing to OSS and assuming commoditization of database+compute tech (Apache Arrow, Nvidia RAPIDS, ...). We've wanted to further open most of our code, not just those libs, so we're not the only ones writing funny distributed GPU webapp+etl stuff... but couldn't find a way that made sense so far. So, I've been watching with great interest, and good luck to the teams involved!