Auto starting and stopping an EC2 instance at a given time

Posted by lee jones on Jan 13, 2014 in AWS, Cloud

This blog post covers the process of automatically starting and stopping an EC2 instance at a given point in time. In my case I needed to spin up an instance, do some work and then shut it down afterwards. This is perfectly suited to AWS and cloud computing and typifies the ethos of elastic scaling and capacity-on-demand. In order to start/stop an instance you will need to make use of the AWS Auto Scaling capabilities which are both straight-forward but very, very powerful. The first thing that you’ll need to do is set up the Auto scaling tools. Amazon have an excellent step-by-step guide posted here If done correctly you should be able to open a new command prompt (or powershell terminal) and type as-cmd 1 as-cmd You should get a listing of all auto-scaling commands: Command Name Description ------------ ----------- as-attach-instances Attaches Instances to Auto Scaling group as-create-auto-scaling-group Create a new Auto Scaling group. as-create-launch-config Creates a new launch configuration. as-create-or-update-tags Create or update tags. as-delete-auto-scaling-group Deletes the specified Auto Scaling group. as-delete-launch-config Deletes the specified launch configuration. as-delete-notification-configuration Deletes the specified notification configuration. as-delete-policy Deletes the specified policy. as-delete-scheduled-action Deletes the specified scheduled action. as-delete-tags Delete the specified tags as-describe-account-limits Describes limits for the account. as-describe-adjustment-types Describes all policy adjustment types. as-describe-auto-scaling-groups Describes the specified Auto Scaling groups. as-describe-auto-scaling-instances Describes the specified Auto Scaling instances. as-describe-auto-scaling-notification-types Describes all Auto Scaling notification types. as-describe-launch-configs Describes the specified launch configurations. as-describe-metric-collection-types Describes all metric colle... metric granularity types. as-describe-notification-configurations Describes all notification...given Auto Scaling groups. as-describe-policies Describes the specified policies. as-describe-process-types Describes all Auto Scaling process types. as-describe-scaling-activities Describes a set of activit...ties belonging to a group. as-describe-scheduled-actions Describes the specified scheduled actions. as-describe-tags Describes tags as-describe-termination-policy-types Describes all Auto Scaling termination policy types. as-disable-metrics-collection Disables collection of Auto Scaling group metrics. as-enable-metrics-collection Enables collection of Auto Scaling group metrics. as-execute-policy Executes the specified policy. as-put-notification-configuration Creates or replaces notifi...or the Auto Scaling group. as-put-scaling-policy Creates or updates an Auto Scaling policy. as-put-scheduled-update-group-action Creates or updates a scheduled update group action. as-resume-processes Resumes all suspended Auto... given Auto Scaling group. as-set-desired-capacity Sets the desired capacity of the Auto Scaling group. as-set-instance-health Sets the health of the instance. as-suspend-processes Suspends all Auto Scaling ... given Auto Scaling group. as-terminate-instance-in-auto-scaling-group Terminates a given instance. as-update-auto-scaling-group Updates the specified Auto Scaling group. help version Prints the version of the CLI tool and the API. For help on a specific command, type ' --help' Getting started Now you can start implementing auto scaling. Auto scaling on a schedule requires a number of components which form the what, where and when to scale: 1. A launch configuration (the ‘what’) 2. A scaling group (the ‘where’) 3. A schedule policy (the ‘when’) 1. [WHAT] Create the launch configuration From your command prompt enter the following command: as-create-launch-config "screenshotter-launch-config" --image-id "ami-12345678" --instance-type "m1.medium" 1 as-create-launch-config "screenshotter-launch-config"...