How to downsize an AWS RDS instance to free tier

Question

I want to create a free tier clone of a production AWS RDS PostgreSQL . As per my understanding, following are different ways

1. create a snapshot of the production DB and restore it on t2.micro
2. create a read replica of the production DB using t2.micro and then detach it as independent database
3. create a free tier database and restore a database dump of the production db

Option 3 is my last preference.

The problem is while creating read replica or restoring from snapshot, AWS doesn't explicitly allow to choose the free tier template. I just want to know if restoring to t2.micro without any advanced features like autoscaling, performance monitoring etc. is equivalent to free tier or not? I read here that the key thing with AWS production DB is that AWS provisions a secondary database provisioned to fallback in event of failure of the primary database or the Availability Zone in which the database is running.

Answer 1

AWS Free Tier doesn't actually care about the kind of service you use. Per their website you just get 750 instance hours per month for a db.t2.micro .

You can use these in any service you see fit and the discount will be applied automatically for the first 12 months .

Looking at the pricing page for RDS Postgres I can see, that these instances aren't listed anymore, which seems weird. The t2 instance family is fairly old, so they're probably trying to phase it out, but typically you can provision older instance types using the API directly if they're not available in the Console.

So what you want to do is create your db.t2.micro instance using one of the SDKs or the AWS CLI and restore from a snapshot . Alternatively you can create a read replica from the CLI and set the class to db.t2.micro . Later detaching that from the main cluster should work.

The production ready stuff refers to the Multi-AZ deployment, which is good for production use, but for anything production related a t2.micro seems like a bad choice, so I'm going to assume you're not planing to do that.