Off-hours scheduling
A development VM that runs 24/7 but is only used during working hours is paying for roughly two-thirds of its time for nothing. Off-hours scheduling stops predictable, non-production workloads on a calendar — nights and weekends — and starts them again before they are needed.
What we look for
Section titled “What we look for”- A resource whose cost/usage shows a clear diurnal or weekday/weekend pattern: busy in business hours, near-idle outside them.
- Signals that it is safe to pause — non-prod naming/tags, no background batch jobs in the off-window, and (for databases) a tier that tolerates a scheduled scale-down.
- The schedule is anchored to your configured business hours, so “off-hours” means what it means for your organisation.
Where a workload is hot even at peak, we suppress the schedule and recommend a permanent resize instead — scheduling a resource that is genuinely busy would hurt it.
How to act
Section titled “How to act”Scheduling is fully reversible: disable the automation (or remove the schedule tag) and the resource returns to 24/7. leancosts drafts the start/stop schedule, the validation that off-window cost drops to near zero, and the rollback. Follow Act on a cost finding.