Scheduled GCE VM instance startup and shutdown

google-cloud-platform

I'm using GCE for a small R&D project with limited budget. We would like to be able to start/stop instances automatically on a schedule e.g. to run VM instances during office hours but shut them down out of hours to save costs. As far as I can tell, there is no instance scheduler in the current GCE toolset.

Best Answer

You can use Zorya - open source Google Compute Engine instance scheduler.

Blog: https://blog.doit-intl.com/reduce-google-compute-engine-costs-by-60-with-zorya-gce-instance-scheduler-eae07131cafa

GitHub: https://github.com/doitintl/zorya

Related Solutions

GCE metadata – get instance name

For Linux VM instances try this script instead:

VMNAME=$(curl -H Metadata-Flavor:Google http://metadata/computeMetadata/v1/instance/hostname | cut -d. -f1)
ZONE=$(curl -H Metadata-Flavor:Google http://metadata/computeMetadata/v1/instance/zone | cut -d/ -f4)
gcloud compute instances delete $VMNAME --zone $ZONE --quiet

You will also need to make sure that the service account of the VM instance is a project member with edit permission.

GCE project-wide SSH keys not propogating

First, make sure that your VM instance can communicate with metadata server and can read the project-wide sshKeys value. To verify this, connect to your VM and run the following command:

curl http://metadata.google.internal/computeMetadata/v1/project/attributes/sshKeys -H "Metadata-Flavor: Google"

The output of the command should be SSH keys that you've added to the metadata of your project. If the command can not communicate with metadata, that means your internal firewall blocks the traffic between your VM and metadata server.

If the communication is successful and you can read the value of sshKeys, then you should verify that account manager daemon is running. In Ubuntu 14.04, the daemon script is located at:

/usr/share/google/google_daemon/manage_accounts.py

Use the following command to verify its running status:

sudo ps aux | grep manage_accounts.py

Best Answer

Related Solutions

GCE metadata – get instance name

GCE project-wide SSH keys not propogating

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