Question

A software company runs about 60 non-production (development and QA) VM-based environments on Compute Engine. Developers work standard business hours (roughly 9 AM to 6 PM, Monday to Friday) in a single time zone, but the environments currently run 24/7, driving up costs. Management wants to significantly reduce spend on these environments without requiring developers to change how they access or provision the machines, and the environments must retain their disk state between sessions. Which approach best meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Use Cloud Scheduler with a Cloud Function (or an instance schedule) to automatically stop the instances outside business hours and start them before the workday begins.

Answer

Migrate all non-production workloads to Spot VMs to take advantage of the lowest available pricing.

Answer

Purchase three-year committed use discounts for the non-production instance families to lower the hourly rate.

Answer

Delete the environments at the end of each day and recreate them from Terraform each morning.