Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility) Elastic Clusters supports readable secondaries, and start and stop clusters

[Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility)](https://aws.amazon.com/documentdb/) Elastic Clusters now support readable secondaries, ability to configure the shard instance count, and ability start and stop clusters. These new features help you scale read workloads and improve usage efficiency of your Elastic Clusters. Configuring the shard instance count enables you to set the number of instances per shard. Additional instances per shard can improve cluster availability, and the amount of read workload the cluster can handle. To read from the secondary shard instances set the ‘readPreference' connection parameter as 'secondaryPreferred'. Specifying the read preference to 'secondaryPreferred' routes the read queries from the client to your shard replica instances and write queries to the shard writer instance. Stopping and starting clusters makes it easy and affordable to use Amazon DocumentDB Elastic Clusters for development and test purposes where the cluster is not required to be running all of the time. Stopping a cluster stops all instances on all shards, and you are not charged for vCPU while the cluster is stopped. You can stop a cluster for up to seven days at a time. After seven days, the cluster will be automatically started. DocumentDB Elastic Clusters enable you to elastically scale your document database to handle millions of reads and writes per second with petabytes of storage. To learn more, read the [documentation](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/documentdb/latest/developerguide/docdb-using-elastic-clusters.html), and get started by creating an Amazon DocumentDB Elastic Clusters using only a few steps in the [AWS Management Console](https://console.aws.amazon.com/console/home.). For pricing and region availability, visit the [pricing page](https://aws.amazon.com/documentdb/pricing/).