sleep & wake

Pause a non-production or idle environment with a single command, and wake it back up when you need it — without opening the AWS Management Console.

What it does

• sleep [env] scales your ECS services (app and worker, when present) to 0 and stops the RDS instance or Aurora cluster, printing the estimated hourly/monthly compute savings.
• wake [env] starts the database first (waiting until it is available), then restores the exact ECS desired counts recorded at sleep time.
• sleep also pauses the add cron schedule (when configured) and suspends SQS worker auto-scaling, so no scheduled task or queued message wakes the environment back up; wake resumes both. Schedules that were never deployed and unregistered scaling targets are skipped gracefully.
• Sleeping the default (production) environment requires confirmation (--yes in automation); named environments sleep without prompting.
• AWS automatically restarts stopped RDS databases after 7 consecutive days — sleep prints the exact restart timestamp, and wake warns if the window already elapsed.
• Sleep state lives in .grada/sleep-state.json (one entry per environment, gitignored), so wake restores your original replica counts even for scaled-out services.
• On --target lambda projects, compute is already scale-to-zero, so sleep/wake manage only the database (and pause/resume the cron schedule) — no services are scaled or restored.
• On --target static projects there is nothing to pause — no compute or database exists — so sleep reports nothing-to-sleep without suggesting apply.
• Emits sleep_run / wake_run telemetry events recording the outcome.

Usage

npx grada-run sleep staging
npx grada-run wake staging
npx grada-run sleep --yes
npx grada-run wake --no-wait
npx grada-run sleep staging --skip-db

Flags

Flag	Description
[env]	Positional environment name (e.g. staging, pr-42). Aliases --workspace. Defaults to the default environment.
--workspace <name>	Explicit environment name. Wins over the positional [env].
--project-name <name>	Explicit project name override (defaults to the name in terraform/main.tf, then the directory name).
--cluster <name>	Explicit ECS cluster override.
--service <name>	Explicit ECS app service override.
--db-identifier <id>	Explicit database identifier override.
--region <region>	Explicit AWS region override.
--skip-db	Scale ECS services only; leave the database running.
--no-wait	On wake, return immediately instead of waiting for RDS available and ECS tasks to reach their desired counts.
--yes	Skip the production confirmation prompt on sleep (also accepts --force; required in --headless/CI runs, which fail instead of prompting).

Both commands are idempotent: re-sleeping an asleep environment (or waking an awake one) reports the current state instead of failing.

Cost & billing drivers

While asleep you stop paying for Fargate task hours (~$9.01/mo per 256/512 replica) and RDS instance compute (~$11.68/mo for db.t4g.micro). 20 GB gp3 storage (~$2.30/mo), the ALB (~$22.27/mo), ElastiCache Valkey (~$9.49/mo — it has no pause API), and Secrets Manager secrets keep billing until you run destroy. Aurora Serverless v2 already idles at 0 ACU, so stopping it only prevents active wake-ups. Lambda projects skip the ALB line entirely — asleep, only storage, secrets, and (if present) Valkey keep billing.

See also

• status
• destroy