At Apptio, we use the stage environment to run test upgrades on exact copies of customer data
before signing off the release. For this, we have 5 RDS with total storage reaching 32,000GBs.
Usually, once the sanity upgrades are done, the Stage environments are rarely used. AWS does
not allow RDS to remain turned off for more than 7 days. So even if we turn an instance off
it will again automatically start after 7 days. Plus, these are costly to keep running with
high IOPS values. What if we could easily turn off these instances and keep them off when not
required? Our implementation explores solution to this problem.
