Pausing and resuming clusters - Amazon Redshift
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Pausing and resuming clusters

If you have a cluster that only needs to be available at specific times, you can pause the cluster and later resume it. While the cluster is paused, on-demand billing is suspended. Only the cluster's storage incurs charges. For more information about pricing, see the Amazon Redshift pricing page.

When you pause a cluster, Amazon Redshift creates a snapshot, begins terminating queries, and puts the cluster in a pausing state. If you delete a paused cluster without requesting a final snapshot, then you can't restore the cluster. You can't cancel or roll back a pause or resume operation after it's initiated.

You can pause and resume a cluster on the Amazon Redshift console, with the Amazon CLI, or with Amazon Redshift API operations.

You can schedule actions to pause and resume a cluster. When you use the new Amazon Redshift console to create a recurring schedule to pause and resume, then two scheduled actions are created for the date range that you choose. The scheduled action names are suffixed with -pause and -resume. The total length of the name must fit within the maximum size of a scheduled action name.

You can't pause the following types of clusters:

  • EC2-Classic clusters.

  • Clusters that are not active, for example, a cluster that is currently modifying.

  • Hardware security module (HSM) clusters.

  • Clusters that have automated snapshots turned off.

When deciding to pause a cluster, consider the following:

  • Connections or queries to the cluster aren't available.

  • You can't see query monitoring information of a paused cluster on the Amazon Redshift console.

  • You can't modify a paused cluster. Any scheduled actions on the cluster aren't done. These include creating snapshots, resizing clusters, and cluster maintenance operations.

  • Hardware metrics aren't created. Update your CloudWatch alarms if you have alarms set on missing metrics.

  • You can't copy the latest automated snapshots of a paused cluster to manual snapshots.

  • While a cluster is pausing, it can't be resumed until the pause operation is complete.

  • When you pause a cluster, billing is suspended. However, the pause operation typically completes within 15 minutes, depending upon the size of the cluster.

  • Audit logs are archived and not restored on resume.

  • After a cluster is paused, traces and logs might not be available for troubleshooting problems that occurred before the pause.

  • No-backup tables on the cluster are not restored on resume. For more information about no-backup tables, see Excluding tables from snapshots.

  • If you're managing your admin credentials using Amazon Secrets Manager and pause your cluster, your cluster's secret won't be deleted and you'll continue to be billed for the secret. For more information on managing your Redshift admin password with Amazon Secrets Manager, see Managing Amazon Redshift admin passwords using Amazon Secrets Manager.

When you resume a cluster, consider the following:

  • The cluster version of the resumed cluster is updated to the maintenance version based on the maintenance window of the cluster.

  • If you delete the subnet associated with a paused cluster, you might have an incompatible network. In this case, restore your cluster from the latest snapshot.

  • If you delete an Elastic IP address while the cluster is paused, then a new Elastic IP address is requested.

  • If Amazon Redshift can't resume the cluster with its previous elastic network interface, then Amazon Redshift tries to allocate a new one.

  • When you resume a cluster, your node IP addresses might change. You might need to update your VPC settings to support these new IP addresses for features like COPY from Secure Shell (SSH) or COPY from Amazon EMR.

  • If you try to resume a cluster that isn't paused, the resume operation returns an error. If the resume operation is part of a scheduled action, modify or delete the scheduled action to prevent future errors.

  • Depending upon the size of the cluster, it can take several minutes to resume a cluster before queries can be processed. In addition, query performance can be impacted for some period of time while the cluster is being re-hydrated after resume completes.