Hello all,

Just to let you know that Pause for AuraDB Professional instances has now been released.

Paused instances will be charged at 20% of the running cost, and we'll auto resume them after 30 days to ensure they are up to date with the latest and greatest of the Neo4j database.

Please let us know your feedback.

John

For prototype yes

We'd like an option for a lower cost development environment.

If the pushback here is that storage cost is the same whether the database is running or not, that's fair. It's not the same as a virtual machine or serverless functions that can just be turned on and off.

But there could be a workaround beyond what is proposed prior, which could be an easy flow to export the data (or put it in "cold storage in the cloud"--aka a hosted export file), delete it, spin down the instance, but be able to maintain the url and credentials. This could be zero to minimal cost, but make the process slightly more convenient. Then to restart, there could be an easy import process that asks you for the file or retrieves it from cold storage and restarts things up. It's annoying that we can't save the url and credentials, so that's one piece. But also, the comment that the pricing scheme feels off when you can't turn on and off rings true too. I can understand the logic--you actually trying to save customers money, which is much appreciated--but from a customer perspective it feels a little half-baked, like the intent is there, but not the follow-through.

Really interrested by this feature, specialy if it could be done via a programatic call (API or command line).

We use this feature with other providers and database, to reduce the cost of dev or test environments, pausing the databases at night and week-ends.

When stopped, a database cost could be reduced to its storage cost (database and all of its backups), as there is no CPU, RAM or network usage during this time.

Plus the operational costs you mentionned.

When stopped, no new backups should be created, so old backups should'nt be destroyed until the database was restarted, and a new backup performed.

Agree with you with the pause limitation. For instance paused MongoDB databases at Atlas are automatically restarded after 30 days.

fully agree, we need this feature otherwise the plan per hour does not make any sense - I do not want to destroy the DB is I do not need it for some weeks... especially when you get started with neo4j AURA would be a good idea and playground, but not with this billig commitment...

Joel Klo o clarify some more specific details, would your expectation be that on stopping a database, you would incur no cost, or a small cost?

From a Service Delivery perspective, storing and maintaining an operational view on all stopped databases would incur a cost to us, especially at scale.

While that's going to be a lot lower than a running database, it's not zero and we may have to put limitations on how long you can leave a database "stopped" for.

Thanks for the feature request Joel Klo, I'm very interested to see the popularity of this feature within our user base.