So one of the things I’ve always liked about AWS^WCloud based services is the ability to just spin up development instances and use them, however I’m generally working for between 8 – 10 hours a day and not so often at weekends, but during those hours my servers are running and not doing much, BUT as they are racking up costs (ok so not too much for a t1.micro but the point still stands) and I knew of companies shutting down unused servers during the night and weekends and thought I should give that a go.
So the first attempt at this uses a scheduled data pipeline to run an AWSCLI command to either stop or start servers, sadly due to the lack of complexity in the scheduler in the console (please AWS just put in a text box so I can add in a crontab line) the servers get started and stopped at weekends too, but I’ve now reduced the daily uptime by 14 hours a day, 98 hours a week or 5096 hours a year (you get the point) actually if you take weekends into a count it’s even more than this.
And to do this took 10 minutes thanks to this handy tutorial provided by AWS.