If you often deploy services in the cloud, you certainly, at least once, forgot to stop a test instance. I am like you and I forgot my share of these. Another mistake I do once in a while is to provision a bigger instance than needed, just in case, and forget to downsize it. While this is true for compute instances, it is especially true for database instances. Over time, this situation ends up adding a cost premium. In this post, we’ll discuss a solution to mitigate these extra costs, the use of the RDS Aurora Serverless service. What is Amazon Aurora Serverless? Since last spring, Amazon unveiled a new database related product: RDS Aurora Serverless . The aim of this new product is to simplify the management around Aurora clusters. It brings a likely benefit for the end users, better control over cost. Here are some of the benefits we can expect from this product: Automatic scaling up Automatic scaling down Automatic shutdown after a period of inactivity Automatic startup T