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Scheduled scaling for EC2 Auto Scaling

December 23, 2021

Scheduled scaling for EC2 Auto Scaling can help out with predicable load by specifying capacity changes on a schedule. For example when a busy period is expected or to save money for your development environment scaling them down outside office hours.

Scheduled autoscaling supports one time only scaling events or on a recurring basis. To create a recurring scaling schedule you can use a cron expression with optionally a start and/or end date and time.

The examples are for Terraform and CloudFormation. Both will do the following:

  • monday-friday scale down at 22:00
  • monday-friday scale up at 06:00

Terraform

resource "aws_autoscaling_schedule" "development-up" {
  scheduled_action_name  = "development-up"
  min_size = 1
  max_size = 3
  desired_capacity = 2
  time_zone = "Europe/Amsterdam"
  recurrence = "00 06 * * 1-5"
  autoscaling_group_name = aws_autoscaling_group.example.name
}

resource "aws_autoscaling_schedule" "development-down" {
  scheduled_action_name  = "development-down"
  min_size = 0
  max_size = 0
  desired_capacity = 0
  time_zone = "Europe/Amsterdam"
  recurrence = "00 22 * * 1-5"
  autoscaling_group_name = aws_autoscaling_group.example.name
}

CloudFormation

Resources:
  ScheduledActionUp:
    Type: AWS::AutoScaling::ScheduledAction
    Properties:
      AutoScalingGroupName: !Ref autoScalingGroup
      MaxSize: '3'
      MinSize: '1'
      DesiredCapacity: '2'
      TimeZone: 'Europe/Amsterdam'
      Recurrence: 00 06 * * 1-5
  ScheduledActionDown:
    Type: AWS::AutoScaling::ScheduledAction
    Properties:
      AutoScalingGroupName: !Ref autoScalingGroup
      MaxSize: '0'
      MinSize: '0'
      DesiredCapacity: '0'
      TimeZone: 'Europe/Amsterdam'
      Recurrence: 00 22 * * 1-5

Source

AWS Scheduled scaling for Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling