What does this Amazon Web Services Solution do?
The Instance Scheduler solution helps you control your Amazon Web Services resource cost by configuring start and stop schedules for your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances.
It also helps reduce operational costs by stopping resources that are not in use and starting resources when capacity is needed. For example, a customer can use Amazon Web Services Instance Scheduler in a production environment to automatically stop instances outside of business hours every day.
Amazon Web Services Solution overview
The diagram below presents the architecture you can automatically deploy using the solution's implementation guide and Amazon CloudFormation template.

Amazon Web Services Instance Scheduler
1. The Amazon CloudFormation template sets up an Amazon CloudWatch event at a customer-defined interval. This event invokes the Instance Scheduler Amazon Lambda function. During configuration, the user defines the Amazon Web Services Regions and accounts, as well as a custom tag that Amazon Web Services Instance Scheduler will use to associate schedules with applicable Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS instances.
2. These values are stored in Amazon DynamoDB, and the Lambda function retrieves them each time it runs. You can then apply the custom tag to applicable instances.
3. During initial configuration of the Instance Scheduler, you define a tag key you will use to identify applicable Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS instances. When you create a schedule, the name you specify is used as the tag value that identifies the schedule you want to apply to the tagged resource. For example, a user might use the solution’s default tag name (tag key) Schedule and create a schedule called uk-office-hours. To identify an instance that will use the uk-office-hours schedule, the user adds the Schedule tag key with a value of uk-office-hours.
Amazon Web Services Instance Scheduler
Version 1.4.0
Last updated: 03/2022
Author: Amazon Web Services
Estimated deployment time: 5 min
Features
Cross-account instance scheduling
Configure schedules or periods using Scheduler CLI
Automated tagging
Configure schedules or periods using SSM maintenance window

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