Reducing Amazon RDS costs

Question

I have an Amazon RDS instance class db.m1.medium. I would like to downgrade to db.m1.small to save on costs since it's not being used much.

When I do this, are there any software changes involved? My concern is that settings will get changed when it downgrades. I don't want anything getting corrupt or MySQL settings getting changed.

Please advise. Thanks!

Answer 1

Your RDS settings will not be automatically changed if you change the instance type. However, you should check the monitoring on the db.m1.medium before downgrading to make sure you'd have enough memory in a db.m1.small. You'd be dropping from 3.75GB to 1.7GB.

Answer 2

I wrote some information and some concepts explaining what are the most expensive parts of RDS and how to plan to reduce costs. See if it helps https://shatteredsilicon.net/blog/2021/06/10/how-to-reduce-rds-costs-on-aws/