What does this AWS Solution do?
This solution offers infrastructure on demand so that customers can control their resource capacity and pay only for what they consume. One simple method to reduce costs is to stop resources that are not in use, and then start those resources again when their capacity is needed.
The AWS Instance Scheduler is a simple solution that enables customers to easily configure custom start and stop schedules for their Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances. The solution is easy to deploy and can help reduce operational costs for both development and production environments. Customers who use this solution to run instances during regular business hours can save up to 70% compared to running those instances 24 hours a day.
This webpage provides an overview of the Instance Scheduler design and functionality.
AWS Solution overview
This solution allows you to create automatic start and stop schedules for your Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS instances. The diagram below presents the components and functionality you can build using the Instance Scheduler implementation guide and accompanying AWS CloudFormation template.

AWS Instance Scheduler
An Amazon CloudWatch event triggers an AWS Lambda function that checks the current state of each appropriately tagged instance against the targeted state defined in an associated schedule in Amazon DynamoDB. Then, the Lambda function applies the applicable start or stop action to the instance.
The Lambda function also records the name of the schedule, the number of instances associated with that schedule, and the number of running instances as an optional custom metric in Amazon CloudWatch.
AWS Instance Scheduler
Version 1.3.0
Last updated: 05/2020
Author: AWS
Estimated deployment time: 10 min
Features
Reference implementation
Scheduler command line interface
Automated tagging
Partial automation

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