Schedule startup and shutdown of a VM instance on GCP

Question

I'm using GCE for a small R&D project with restricted budget.

We would prefer to be able to start/stop instances automatically on a schedule

Example: To run database instances throughout office hours however shut them down out of hours to avoid wasting cost. Is there an instance scheduler for this purpose?

Answer 1

With the recent release of Google Cloud Scheduler, this is possible. 

Here's a step-by-step tutorial on using Cloud Scheduler to schedule start/stop of GCE VM instances. 

https://cloud.google.com/scheduler/docs/scheduling-instances-with-cloud-scheduler

Hope this helps!