temporarily shut down redshift to reduce bill

Question

Amazon says the following on Redshift billing "Node usage hours are billed for each hour your data warehouse cluster is running in an Available state. If you no longer wish to be charged for your data warehouse cluster, you must terminate it to avoid being billed for additional node hours." This means if I just create a cluster and whether use it or not I'll be billed 24/7 because the cluster doesn't have any state like "Suspend". Is there a way to shut down the whole Redshift server when not in use so that I'll be billed only for the hours when I want to use the clusters?

Edit: With Tomasz's reply it sounds like if I want to shutdown the cluster on weekend it'll be like backing up the whole database on Friday evening and restoring on Sunday evening. This doesn't sound good. What does Amazon really mean when they say "PAY ONLY FOR THE HOURS YOU USE"?

Can you tell me how much time will it take to backup/restore a data warehouse of size around 100GB? Can I automatically associate security groups to the cluster after restoring from the Java code?

Answer 1

Now we can able to pause and resume the Redshift cluster (both Console and CLI)

check out the link:

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/lower-your-costs-with-the-new-pause-and-resume-actions-on-amazon-redshift/