With the addition of automation, the resources deployed within our cloud environments may be temporarily shutdown during non-business hours. The result is cost savings during off work hours when the resources are not needed.
Automated Bots were implemented during the month of September, 2016. Teams were provided with a selection of several outage windows as well as an "opt-out" selection that could be used in the case where global access may not be amenible to a fixed schedule.
Each resource receives a key/value tag that indicates their selection. The tag values available were represented in UTC time to avoid confusion.
The effort yeilded an average savings of $150/day (or an estimated $55k annually) in pre-production environments without consideration of growth.