Automate starting and stopping AWS instances

Publication date: October 2020 (last update: June 2024)

The Instance Scheduler on AWS solution automates the starting and stopping of various AWS services iincluding Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances.

This solution helps reduce operational costs by stopping resources that are not in use and starting resources when their capacity is needed. For example, a company can use Instance Scheduler on AWS to automatically stop instances outside of business hours every day. If you leave all of your instances running at full utilization, this solution can result in up to 70% cost savings for those instances that are only necessary during regular business hours (weekly utilization reduced from 168 hours to 50 hours).

Instance Scheduler on AWS leverages Amazon Web Services (AWS) resource tags and AWS Lambda to automatically stop and restart instances across multiple AWS Regions and accounts on a customer-defined schedule. This solution also allows you to use hibernation for stopped EC2 instances.

This implementation guide provides an overview of the Instance Scheduler on AWS solution, its reference architecture and components, considerations for planning the deployment, and configuration steps for deploying the solution to the AWS Cloud.

This guide is intended for IT infrastructure architects, administrators, and DevOps professionals who want to implement Instance Scheduler on AWS in their environment.

Use this navigation table to quickly find answers to these questions:

If you want to . . .	Read . . .
Know the cost for running this solution. The estimated cost for running this solution in the US East (N. Virginia) Region is USD $13.15 per month.	Cost
Understand the security considerations for this solution.	AWS Well-Architected Security Security
Configure schedules.	Scheduler configuration table
Know which AWS Regions are supported for this solution.	Supported AWS Regions
View or download the AWS CloudFormation template included in this solution to automatically deploy the infrastructure resources (the "stack") for this solution.	AWS CloudFormation templates
Access the source code and optionally use the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) (AWS CDK) to deploy the solution.	GitHub repository