Amazon RDS recently announced the ability to start and stop RDS instances. This allows you to stop and restart RDS instances overnight, on weekends, and other times where your RDS instance isn’t needed. By following this best practice, you can drastically reduce your RDS costs, in some cases, by as much as 65%.
The catch though, is that it’s only supported on single-AZ, non-replicated RDS instances. This means that your Multi-AZ RDS instance is not supported.
But there is an alternative that will allow you to reduce your RDS costs for Multi-AZ RDS instances.
If your RDS instance is single-AZ, and not replicated (meaning, you don’t have any read-replicas), then you can take advantage of the new start and stop features of Amazon RDS.
From the AWS Management Console:
Actions menu, select Stop.When you’re ready to restart your RDS instance:
Actions menu, select Start.Using the AWS CLI, you can do the following:
aws rds start-db-instance --db-instance-identifier <id>
and
aws rds stop-db-instance --db-instance-identifier <id>
However, both of these methods are manual. It’s not easy to develop a simple and reliable cost-reduction strategy using manual steps.
Instead of starting and stopping your RDS instances manually, you can use Skeddly to start and stop them for you on any schedule you want.
Multi-AZ RDS instances do not support the new start and stop features. Instead, you can reduce costs by deleting and restoring your RDS instance.
For example, at night, you can delete the RDS instance, taking an RDS snapshot in the process. The next morning, you can restore a fresh RDS instance from the previous night’s snapshot, preserving the original endpoint.
From the AWS Management Console:
Actions menu, select Delete.When you’re ready to restart your RDS instance:
Actions menu, select Restore Snapshot,This can be done using the AWS CLI as well.
Again, this is a very manual process. A process that can be forgotten, or can be error-prone.
Instead, the entire workflow can be automated with Skeddly. Skeddly will manage the shutdown of your RDS instance, along with all the steps of restoring the RDS instance. And it will never forget.
Your instance will be available when you need it. Your instance will be stopped when you don’t. And you will save money.
You can read our case study about how Privo IT uses Skeddly to reduce RDS costs.
Just because Multi-AZ RDS instances doesn’t support starting and stopping, there’s no reason you cannot still reduce your RDS costs.
Start lowering your RDS costs today. Sign-up for our 30 day free trial or sign-in to your Skeddly account to get started.