Instance Scheduler on AWS

Configure start and stop schedules for your Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS instances to manage costs

Overview

Instance Scheduler on AWS automates the starting and stopping of various AWS services, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling Groups, and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances. Automating this process helps reduce operational costs by stopping and starting resources as needed. This AWS Solution uses resource tags and AWS Lambda to automatically stop and start instances based on a schedule you define, and it can be deployed across multiple AWS Regions.

When compared to a setup where you leave all your instances continuously running at full utilization (even when those resources aren't being used), this solution can lead to significant cost savings by aligning your workloads with the AWS Well-Architected Cost Optimization best practices.

Benefits

Cross-account instance scheduling

This solution includes a template that creates the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles necessary to start and stop instances in secondary accounts. 

Automated tagging

This solution can automatically add tags to all instances it starts or stops. The solution also includes macros that allow you to add variable information to the tags.

Configure schedules or periods using Scheduler CLI

This solution includes a command line interface (CLI) that provides commands for configuring schedules and periods. The CLI allows customers to estimate cost savings for a given schedule.

Configure schedules or periods using AWS Systems Manager maintenance window

For EC2 instances, this solution can use Systems Manager maintenance windows defined in the same AWS Region as the instances and start and stop the instances for the maintenance window.

Technical details

You can automatically deploy this architecture using the implementation guide and the accompanying AWS CloudFormation templates, or get started with the resources below:

Resource Scheduler

With Quick Setup, a capability of AWS Systems Manager, you can configure Resource Scheduler to automate the starting and stopping of your EC2 instances across your AWS accounts and Regions. Resource Scheduler provides a simple user interface (UI).

To learn more about Resource Scheduler, review related resources in the implementation guide.

Cost Optimization with AWS

Build modern, scalable applications on AWS to transform your organization, all while optimizing costs through Cost Optimization with AWS. The variety of AWS pricing options provides you with the flexibility to design your purchase plan to meet your specific workload needs.

Cost Optimization Pillar - AWS Well Architected Labs

This repository contains documentation and code in the format of hands-on labs to help you learn, measure, and build cost optimized workloads using well-architected best practices.

You can learn more here

Cloud Foundations - Guidance for Cloud Financial Management on AWS

This Guidance helps you set up a Cloud Financial Management (CFM) capability to manage and optimize your expenses for cloud services. This capability includes near real-time visibility and cost and usage analysis to support decision-making for topics such as spend dashboards, optimization, spend limits, chargeback, and anomaly detection and response. 

Use cases for this AWS Solution
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