Relational Database Service (RDS)
Check 1
Section titled “Check 1”Check 2
Section titled “Check 2”Check 3
Section titled “Check 3”If you use RDS in your environment, it’s likely it will be high on your bill. Fortunately there are a lot of steps you can follow to reduce the cost.
Decommissioning
Section titled “Decommissioning”Identify RDS instances which are no longer required.
Rightsizing
Section titled “Rightsizing”Ensure that RDS instances are Compute Optimizer claims to be able to help with this but I’m yet to see it…
Scheduling
Section titled “Scheduling”By stopping RDS instances when they are not in use, you remove the associated run cost. If you have databases used for dev/test/pre-prod environments, consider if they can be stopped out of hours.
Type / generation
Section titled “Type / generation”Using the latest generation of instance type will often save you money. There are times where the same xlarge instance type will
Graviton
Section titled “Graviton”Graviton is AWS’ ARM based CPU which delivers better performance at lower cost. There is no reason not to use Graviton instance types for your RDS instances as the underlying database RDS software is compatible.
AWS Database Savings Plans
Section titled “AWS Database Savings Plans”New November 2025
These can be purchased