¶ Description
In an effort to keep compute costs low and benefit from the elasticity provided by the cloud, we have instituted a function that runs daily after hours to shut down VMs.
This change will take effect on the evening of July 25th, 2022.
¶ Details
Every day at 03:00 UTC (23:00 EDT or 22:00 EST) all virtual machines will be scanned and if the required tag isn't present, and the VM is running, it will be shutdown.
Every Monday to Friday at 10:00 UTC (06:00 EDT or 05:00 EST) any virtual machines shutdown the previous weekday will be powered back on. On Monday, the VMs from the previous Friday's shutdown will be powered on.
¶ Opting out
In order to have a machine not shutdown as mentioned above, add a Tag to the VM with the name of vmkeepon and a value of true. See attached image for example
¶ Rationale
The greatest cost item in the 163Oxygen Azure tenant are Virtual Machines, as their cost keeps accruing when they are running, regardless whether they are heavily utilized or not.
By following the above schedule, we can reduce the weekly running hours of a VM from 168 hours to 80 hours, which results in a 52.38% saving.
¶ Notes
This will only reduce the compute costs of the virtual machine itself (i.e. assigned CPU and RAM). Storage costs are not affected and always accrue based on usage for storage accounts or the size that disks were provisioned in the case of disks attached to VMs
Currently we are only targeting “regular” virtual machines.
Future iterations will also potentially look at scaling back App Service Plans, Azure Kubernetes Services, and Virtual Machine Scale Sets.
startstopvm-daily