azure - How to turn on/off cloud instances during office hours

Question

I've got my head around creating cloud instances in AWS, Azure and Rackspace. However, I need to turn my instances off at the end of the day and on in the morning as this will half my hosting cost (they are for development).

I've looked at a few management services but they blew my brains out. Is there a simple way to do this?

Answer 1

Azure

REST:

You can do this to Azure deployments by using the Windows Azure Service Management REST API. Because it is REST you can use most programming languages to access it.

You could have an application running on your local machine that schedules calls to these services to delete at a certain time at the end of office hours and then create your service again in the morning.

PowerShell:

Or you can manage your deployments in the same way but instead of using REST you can use Azure PowerShell cmdlets. I have done this way myself and it works nicely.

To help you get started there is a nice tutorial on how to do use PowerShell to deploy Azure applications.

also if you didn't already know I should also mention there is a 3month free trial with Azure if you are simply looking for cutting costs whilst developing.