Externally it appears this way (I can't talk about infrastructure in any real detail). Latency is the same as if you were running MySQL on any other platform A

Externally it appears this way (I can't talk about infrastructure in any real detail). Latency is the same as if you were running MySQL on any other platform AFAIK. If the database is cold, yes, the DB is spun down. An incoming connection will cause the DB to spin up, and in most languages the common MySQL connector will block until it's ready, so it doesn't require special coding around. Databases almost always come up in a matter of seconds.