Starting and Stopping PostgreSQL Amazon RDS Instance Automatically Based on Usage

Question

We're a team of 4 data scientists that use Amazon RDS PostgreSQL for analysis purposes. So we're looking for a way to automatically start/stop the instance automatically but based on usage as opposed to time.

For example, there are clearly solutions for starting and stopping automatically during regular business hours (Stopping an Amazon RDS DB Instance Temporarily).

However, this doesn't quite work for us because we all have different schedules and don't necessarily adhere to a standard schedule. I would like a script that basically checks whether the DB has been used in the past, say 30 minutes, and if not turn off the instance. Then, if someone tries to connect to the DB but it's turned off, then automatically turn it on. My intuition tells me that the latter is harder than the former, but I'm not sure. Is this possible?

Answer 1

To do this you would need to use a CloudWatch Alarm, to do this you would rely on metrics that are available to CloudWatch such as number of connections or CPU Utilization.

This alarm could trigger a Lambda function that will stop your RDS instance, be aware that an RDS instance will restart once it has been off for 7 days.

Alternatively if you're able to use it you could look into Aurora Serverless with the PostgreSQL compatible version. this option would automatically handle the stop/start functionality when no one is using it.