RDS Multi-AZ deployments are designed for production-grade fault tolerance. In non-production environments, this configuration doubles the cost of database instances and storage with little added value. Unless explicitly required for high-availability testing, Multi-AZ in dev, staging, or test environments typically results in avoidable expense.
RDS instances incur compute and storage charges for both the primary and standby nodes in a Multi-AZ configuration, along with associated data transfer between zones.
Identify RDS instances in non-production accounts or environments with Multi-AZ enabled Use environment tags or naming conventions to distinguish staging and development workloads Evaluate instance-level metrics to assess whether failover capabilities are actively used or needed Check for duplicated storage and compute resources across Availability Zones
Modify RDS instances in non-production environments to use single-AZ deployment Update provisioning templates and IaC modules to default to single-AZ for non-prod Create safeguards to prevent Multi-AZ deployments in dev/test unless explicitly approved
