Amazon RDS - Online only when needed

Question

I had a question about Amazon RDS. I only need the database online for about 2 hours a day but I am dealing with quite a large database at around 1gb.

I have two main questions:

1. Can I automate bringing my RDS database online and offline via scripts to save money?

2. When I put a RDS offline to stop the "work hours" counter running and billing me, when I bring it back online will it still have the same content (i.e will all my data stay there, or will it have to be a blank DB?). If so, is there any way around this rather than backing up to S3 and reimporting it every time?

Answer 1

Here's a script that will stop/start/reboot an RDS instance

#!/bin/bash

# usage ./startStop.sh lhdevices start

INSTANCE="$1"
ACTION="$2"



# export vars to run RDS CLI
export JAVA_HOME=/usr;
export AWS_RDS_HOME=/home/mysql/RDSCli-1.15.001;
export PATH=$PATH:/home/mysql/RDSCli-1.15.001/bin;
export EC2_REGION=us-east-1;
export AWS_CREDENTIAL_FILE=/home/mysql/RDSCli-1.15.001/keysLightaria.txt;

if [ $# -ne 2 ]
then
echo "Usage: $0 {MySQL-Instance Name} {Action either start, stop or reboot}"
echo ""
exit 1
fi


shopt -s nocasematch

if [[ $ACTION == 'start' ]]
then
echo "This will $ACTION a MySQL Instance"  
rds-restore-db-instance-from-db-snapshot lhdevices 
--db-snapshot-identifier        dbStart --availability-zone us-east-1a     
--db-instance-class db.m1.small 

echo "Sleeping while instance is created"
sleep 10m