Instance Scheduler

It's 2am. Your dev VMs are running. Your staging VMs are running. The QA environment nobody's touched since Thursday is running. All of them are billing you — per second — for compute you aren't using.

This isn't carelessness. It's the absence of a tool. Nobody forgets to turn off their VMs — they just don't have a way to do it automatically. So the machines run 168 hours a week, and you use 50.

That's 70% waste. On a €10,000/month compute bill, that's €7,000 lighting on fire every month.

What it does

Instance Scheduler starts and stops your Outscale VMs on a schedule you define. Business hours only? Done. Weekdays 7am to 9pm? Done. A custom schedule for a team in a different timezone? Done.

Set it once and it runs. Every day, at the times you specified, your VMs start. At the end of the window, they stop. Outscale bills per second — so every second a machine is off, you're saving money.

And here's the part most people miss: when Vextnd stops a VM, it can also reduce the IOPS on attached volumes. A stopped machine with high-IOPS volumes is still costing you for those IOPS — even though nothing is reading or writing. The scheduler drops IOPS to baseline on stop, restores them on start. That's savings on top of savings.

How it works

Select the instances you want to schedule — one, ten, or fifty. Define the schedule: start time, stop time, active days. Pick the timezone so your Paris team and your Singapore team aren't fighting over UTC offsets.

That's it. The scheduler takes over. Every transition is logged — you get a full audit trail of every start, every stop, every retry. If a start fails (Outscale API hiccup, resource conflict), the scheduler retries automatically and logs the outcome.

The dashboard shows every scheduled instance at a glance: current state, next transition, schedule summary. One screen tells you everything. No cron jobs to maintain, no Lambda functions to debug, no shell scripts on a bastion host that break when someone changes the SSH key.

Need to override the schedule? A planned override lets you keep machines running outside normal hours — for a deployment, a demo, an on-call incident. One-time or recurring, without touching the base schedule.

Why it matters

The math is simple. A typical dev/staging fleet runs 50 hours out of 168. Scheduling those machines saves 70% of their compute cost. On Outscale's per-second billing, the savings are real and immediate — visible on your next daily consumption report.

But the bigger value is discipline. Scheduling forces teams to think about when they need resources. That conversation alone — "do we really need this running at 3am?" — changes behavior. Teams start right-sizing, consolidating environments, and questioning why they have seven copies of the same staging stack.

The audit trail matters too. When the CFO asks "what are we doing about cloud costs?" — you can show them a log of every action, every euro saved, every schedule running. That's not a promise. It's proof.

Stop paying for the hours you don't use. Start your free trial on Vextnd.