How to shut down AWS test environment on a particular time

Question

We have a test environment on a AWS elastic beanstalk and I would like to shut this down on weekends and hours not using.

When inquired I got information about a third party tool that does that which I have to pay extra 50$ a month.

Does anybody any how to automatically shutdown/restart ec2 instances/elastic-beanstalk on AWS ?

Please note I am fairly new to AWS and I tried finding out to see if I can do this easily but unable to.

Thanks for any directions.

Answer 1

You can use a solution from AWS: Instance Scheduler

• https://aws.amazon.com/answers/infrastructure-management/instance-scheduler/

It's based on instances tags.

If you have an AutoScaling Group in your stack, you can use:

• https://docs.aws.amazon.com/autoscaling/ec2/userguide/schedule_time.html

With a simple cron expression, you will schedule the size of your ASG.

Answer 2

Skeddly offers 100 free events free tier which would cover your use case https://www.skeddly.com/pricing/

I manage a small development account with 8 EC2 instances, 2 autoscaling groups, and 2 RDS instances, and I schedule them for use about 200 hours a month (approx 50 hours a week.)

I get significant savings over demand and even reserved instances by this type of scheduling tool. I pay about $10 per month. This is a good value, compared to building an maintaining your own scheduler.

Usual disclaimer: Just a happy customer.