Auto Shutdown and Start Amazon EC2 Instance

Question

Can I automatically start and terminate my Amazon instance using Amazon API? Can you please describe how this can be done? I ideally need to start the instance and stop the

Answer 1

Just in case somebody stumbles on this ye old question, nowadays you can achieve the same thing by adding a schedule to an auto scaling group: increase the amount of instances in an auto scaling group to 1 at certain times and decrease it back to 0 afterwards.

And since this answer is getting a lot of views, I thought to link to a very helpful guide about this: Running EC2 Instances on a Recurring Schedule with Auto Scaling