Is it recommended to periodically change the RDS instance type for nightly scaling?

Question

I have an app that is used heavily during the day and hardly used at night and on Sundays. RDS MySQL is quite expensive and I was wondering if I could scale down in the evening and scale up in the morning by changing the instance type from m5.4xlarge to m5.large and back. I don't want to turn it off completely because we have some cron running at night and some users may want to access the system during non-working hours, but typically the database only runs about 2% of the CPU during these times. The only advice I've found for this usage is to close the instance I want to avoid. I've been changing the instance type manually over the past few days and it seems like there should be no problem automating this to me. Approximate downtime. A 2 minute instance change is perfectly acceptable to me and I can schedule it at a time when usage is already low. This question is not about how this is technically possible, but about whether it is generally recommended or if there are any drawbacks that I haven't thought of yet. I'd really like to know why I haven't found any information on this, as this seems to be a fairly common use case for any business application that only works in one time zone.

I did it manually and it seems to work fine. I've searched the internet for hours but haven't found any useful pro or con.

Answer 1

This is not something people usually do. Amazon Aurora Serverless would be a better way to handle this problem.

Aurora Serverless v2 is an on-demand, auto-scaling configuration of Amazon Aurora. Aurora Serverless v2 helps automate the process of monitoring workloads and sizing database capacity. Automatically adjust capacity based on application needs. You only pay for the resources consumed by your database cluster. As a result, Aurora Serverless v2 helps you stay within your budget and avoid paying for computer resources you don't use.

As an added benefit, Aurora can provide up to five times the throughput of MySQL.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/aurora-serverless-v2.html#aurora-serverless-v2.advantages