Scheduling Azure Instances

Question

I'd like to run a single Azure instance on a predetermined schedule (e.g. 9-5 PM EST, Mon-Fri) to reduce billing and am wondering what the best way to go about it is.

Two parts to the question:

• Can the Service Management API [1] be used to set the InstanceCount to 0 on a predetermined schedule?
• If so, are you still billed for this service, as is the case with suspended deployments?

[1] - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/gonzalorc/archive/2010/02/07/auto-scaling-in-azure.aspx

Answer 1

You can't set the instance count to zero, but you can suspend and then delete the deployment and then redeploy all programmatically.

Answer 2

Steve covered your first bullet point.

For the second: if you suspend your deployment, you are still billed for it. You have to delete the deployment to stop the accrual of compute-hours.

Answer 3

Alternatively, you could use Lokad.CQRS or Lokad.Cloud to combine the tasks that don't need to run all the time on a single compute instance.

Of course, this approach is not universally applicable and depending on the specifics of your application it may not be suitable for your case.