Question

A company runs about 200 non-production EC2 instances used only during business hours (08:00-18:00, Monday to Friday). The CloudOps team wants an automated, low-maintenance solution to stop these instances outside business hours and start them each morning to reduce costs, without deploying or managing any additional compute resources. Which approach best meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Create two EventBridge Scheduler schedules that invoke the AWS-StartEC2Instance and AWS-StopEC2Instance Systems Manager Automation runbooks targeting instances by tag.

Answer

Deploy a dedicated t3.micro EC2 instance running a cron job with the AWS CLI to start and stop the tagged fleet on a schedule.

Answer

Configure an Auto Scaling group with scheduled scaling actions to scale the fleet to zero at night and back up in the morning.

Answer

Enable Systems Manager Patch Manager maintenance windows to power the instances off overnight and on again during the day.