Scheduling EC2 Instances using Lambda and CloudWatch Events

Over the past couple of months MyBuilder has be transitioning from primarily a dedicated server-stack (with orchestration through Puppet) to cloud infrastructure by-way of Amazon Web Services. We have been a proponent of AWS for quite some time, taking advantage of services such as S3 and CloudFront in our current setup. We are also not unfamiliar with EC2, spreading some of our application requirements onto several instances over the past couple of years. However, we really have not been taking full advantage of the ‘Cloud nature’ of the product, and still treating each server as something in-between a Snowflake and Phoenix.

As the team and needs within the business expand, we felt this to be an opportune time to embrace more of its’ offerings. I’ve recently discussed the reasoning behind this thought process on a podcast I co-host. Throughout this transition period I wish to document our experiences moving soley over to the platform, sprinkling in a little Lambda along the way.

Starting and Stopping Instances

One of the key advantages in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) movement is the availability of provisioning resources as and when you require them. A good use-case for this added functionality is to be able to start and stop development resources based on typical week work patterns, providing some additional cost savings. In the video below I highlight how you can start and stop EC2 instances in a scheduled (Cron like) manner, using Lambda, Node.js and CloudWatch Events.

The associated code that was used within this video can be found here.

Scaling Instances

I would now like to expand upon this example by taking advanatge of another IaaS benefit, that being scaling a given resource based on your current demands. In a similar manner to the first demonstration, I will now explain how you can scale a EC2 instance up and down, based on a given schedule.

The associated code that was used within this video can be found here.

I hope that these two short videos have highlighted some of the power that can be gained from using Function as a Service (FaaS) platforms such as Lambda in a server-management setting. Both use-cases would not be possible in our previous dedicated server setup, and give a small glimpse into the world of automating cloud-based server resources.