Stopping an Amazon RDS DB instance temporarily

Suppose that you use a DB instance intermittently, for temporary testing, or for a daily development activity. If so, you can stop your Amazon RDS DB instance temporarily to save money. While your DB instance is stopped, you are charged for provisioned storage (including Provisioned IOPS). You're also charged for backup storage, including manual snapshots and automated backups within your specified retention window. However, you're not charged for DB instance hours. For more information, see Billing FAQs.

You can stop and start DB instances that are running the following engines:

Stopping and starting a DB instance is supported for all DB instance classes, and in all Amazon Regions.

You can stop and start a DB instance whether it is configured for a single Availability Zone. Or you can do so or for Multi-AZ, for database engines that support Multi-AZ deployments. You can't stop an Amazon RDS for SQL Server DB instance in a Multi-AZ configuration.

When you stop a DB instance, the DB instance performs a normal shutdown and stops running. The status of the DB instance changes to stopping and then stopped. Occasionally, an RDS for PostgreSQL DB instance doesn't shut down cleanly. If this happens, you see that the instance goes through a recovery process when you restart it later. This is expected behavior of the database engine, intended to protect database integrity. Some memory-based statistics and counters don't retain history and are re-initialized after restart, to capture the operational workload moving forward.

At the end of the normal shutdown process, any storage volumes remain attached to the DB instance, and their data is kept. Any data stored in the RAM of the DB instance is deleted.

Stopping a DB instance removes pending actions, except for pending actions for the DB instance's option group or DB parameter group.

Automated backups aren't created while a DB instance is stopped. Backups can be retained longer than the backup retention period if a DB instance has been stopped. RDS doesn't include time spent in the stopped state when the backup retention window is calculated.

Benefits

Stopping and starting a DB instance is faster than creating a DB snapshot, and then restoring the snapshot.

When you stop a DB instance it retains its ID, Domain Name Server (DNS) endpoint, parameter group, security group, and option group. When you start a DB instance, it has the same configuration as when you stopped it. In addition, if you stop a DB instance, Amazon RDS keeps the Amazon S3 transaction logs. This means that you can do a point-in-time restore if necessary.

Limitations

The following are some limitations to stopping and starting a DB instance:

Option and parameter group considerations

You can't remove persistent options (including permanent options) from an option group if there are DB instances associated with that option group. This functionality is also true of any DB instance with a state of stopping, stopped, or starting.

You can change the option group or DB parameter group that is associated with a stopped DB instance. However, the change doesn't occur until the next time you start the DB instance. If you chose to apply changes immediately, the change occurs when you start the DB instance. Otherwise the change occurs during the next maintenance window after you start the DB instance.

Public IP address

When you stop a DB instance, it retains its DNS endpoint. If you stop a DB instance that has a public IP address, Amazon RDS releases its public IP address. When the DB instance is restarted, it has a different public IP address.

Stopping a DB instance temporarily

You can stop a DB using the Amazon Web Services Management Console, the Amazon CLI, or the RDS API.

aws rds stop-db-instance --db-instance-identifier mydbinstance