<p>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. </p> <p>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. </p>