Automating switching EC2 instances on and off allows organizations to make considerable savings on their cloud costs. Skeddly offers such a service to ensure that businesses are not spending money on cloud resources when they are not in use – at the weekend, overnight, and on public holidays for example.
The automated actions save businesses considerable time and money, but while rules can be set, there may be times when certain resources need to be kept on or should remain off.
Skeddly has now developed Action Exclusions to help in this regard. Action Exceptions allow certain resources to be taken out of automated control temporarily without having to alter actions that have already been configured.
For instance, a specific EC2 instance would normally be subject to programmed actions but there may be a need to leave the instance on (or off) for 12 hours, 24 hours, a week, or a month.
A situation may arise when an EC2 instance needs to be kept running overnight, or DevOps team members may have to work over the weekend from time to time. In such cases, rather than editing actions and messing with current policies, a simple exclusion can be added based on the appropriate EC2 instance ID.
At the time when all EC2 instances would normally be switched off, the specific EC2 instance with the Action Exclusion set would remain on, while all others would be stopped.
Action Exclusions can be set for a specific resource or set of resources for a specific timeframe. They can be set to never expire or the exclusions can have an expiry date, after which time the resource will no longer be excluded from actions.
The Action Exclusions can be set via the option on the main Actions list and will match resources based on the EC2 instance ID, resource ID, or resource tags.
Currently the Action Exclusions are only available for EC2 instances. They will be extended to other instances such as RDS over time and at the request of users.
