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

AutoScaling is limited to terminating instances. If you want to stop an instance and retain the server state then an external script is the best approach.

You can do this by running a job on another instance that is running 24/7 or you can use a 3rd party service such as Ylastic (mentioned above) or Rocket Peak.

For example in C# the code to stop a server is quite straightforward:

public void stopInstance(string instance_id, string AWSRegion)
        {
            RegionEndpoint myAWSRegion = RegionEndpoint.GetBySystemName(AWSRegion);
            AmazonEC2 ec2 = AWSClientFactory.CreateAmazonEC2Client(AWSAccessKey, AWSSecretKey, myAWSRegion);
            ec2.StopInstances(new StopInstancesRequest().WithInstanceId(instance_id));
        }