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Amazon Web Services shared today that users can now start and stop RDS instances – check out the full announcement on their blog.

This is good news for cost-conscious engineering teams. Until now, databases were generally left running 24×7, even if they were only used during working hours for testing and staging purposes. Now, they can be turned off, so you’re not charged for time you’re not using. Nice!

Keep in mind that stopping the RDS instances will not bring the cost to zero – you will still be charged for provisioned storage, manual snapshots and automated backup storage.

Now, what if you want to start and stop RDS instances on an automated schedule to ensure they’re not left running when they’re not needed? Coming soon, you’ll be able to with ParkMyCloud!

Start and Stop RDS Instances on a Schedule with ParkMyCloud

Since ParkMyCloud was first released, customers have been asking us for the ability to park their RDS instances in the same way that they can park EC2 instances and auto scaling groups.

The logic to start/stop RDS instances using schedules is already in the production code for ParkMyCloud. We have been patiently waiting for AWS to officially announce this capability, so that we could turn the feature ON and release it to the public. That day is finally here!

Our development team has some final end-to-end testing to complete, just to make sure everything works as expected. Expect RDS parking to be released within a couple of weeks! Let us know if you’d like to be notified when this is released, or if you’re interested in beta testing the new functionality.

We’re excited about this opportunity to give ParkMyCloud users what they’re asking for. What else would you like to see for optimal cost control? Comment below to let us know.