How to turn on/off cloud instances during office hours

Question

I\'ve got my head around creating cloud instances in AWS, Azure and Rackspace. However, I need to turn my instances off at the end of the day and on in the morning as this w

Answer 1

NOTE: As for June of 2013, IaaS Instances can be placed in a "stopped (deallocated)" state. In this state you are only billed for storage of any disks associated with the VM. The original answer below describes a VM instance that is in a "stopped" but not deallocated state. The deallocated state is currently the default for VM stop actions taken via the Azure management portal.

The only way to accomplish this in Widows Azure today is to delete the deployment.

If you stop the service, you are still billed (like renting office space, you pay for it even if you aren't in it), and you can't set the instance count to zero. An option may use is to just reduce the instance count to absolute minimum (1) an then scale it back up during needed hours. But the cost benefits of this will depend on the size of your instances.