What is RDS?
Relational Database Service is a managed database as a service from AWS.
You can host most of the popular relational data base systems in RDS including PostgreSQL, MySQL. You can launch and start using RDS instances in minutes.
Key features of RDS
- One click scaling
- Multi AZ and High available
- Replication across multiple AWS regions — read replicas
- Backups — snapshot based (now supports point in time recovery)
Can we stop and start RDS instances?
The answer was “No but there is a work around” until last month and it became “Yes” now.
Until last month there is no option to Stop RDS instance, the work around is you can delete instance with a final snapshot and create a new RDS instance from final snapshot with same name.
You need to make sure all custom settings like option groups, subnet groups, security groups and master password are correct.
Now RDS supports Stopping and Starting Instances. Here is announcement post from AWS
How much time should it take to stop?
According to the post by AWS, while the instance is stopped, storage charges are applicable which is the same for EC2 instances also.
So we can assume that stopping and starting does not involve taking snapshot and restoring back, which are time consuming any way.
Generally EC2 stop and start together takes around 2–4 minutes when it is backed with SSD volumes.
Assume that RDS instance also used General purpose SSD (which is default option).
How much time should it take to stop and start?
RDS needs to do lots more than EC2, including draining/closing exiting connection, flush things to disk, clean up tasks, managing services.
What will be the maximum time it should take when all of the above mentioned things are included?
Time for stopping should not be proportional to data size ideally.
Any guess?
It took 1 and half hours to stop and start the RDS instance at Insping.
80 minutes for stopping, and just 8 minutes for starting.
Do you thing it is acceptable?
My answer is “NO”
Is AWS RDS really designed to take 80 minutes to stop?
My answer is “I don’t think so”
Is something wrong with my setup or actions?
My answer is “I hope No”
Finally what is the reason for such a long time?
My answer is “I really don’t know, i would like to find”
Should i blame AWS for this?
My answer is “Yes, until they give explanation”.
