Create Automation Policies#

Automation policies schedule automatic lifecycle actions on cloud resources — stopping resources outside of business hours, starting them in the morning, and enforcing tag standards. Policies are scoped to your Allocation Groups hierarchy.

Navigate: left navigation → Automation → Policies → “+ New Policy”.

Policy types#

Type

What it does

Start VM

Starts (powers on) compute resources on a schedule

Stop VM

Stops (powers off / deallocates) compute resources on a schedule

Enforce Tags

Applies standard tags or labels to resources on a schedule

See Tag Enforcement Policies for the dedicated Enforce Tags guide.

Creating a Start or Stop VM policy#

Step 1 — General settings#

  • Policy name — descriptive name (e.g. “Stop Dev VMs - After Hours”)

  • Policy type — Start VM or Stop VM

  • Target scope — select a Group, Environment, or Project from your Allocation hierarchy; the policy applies to all matching resources within that scope

Step 2 — Schedule#

Use the visual cron picker with fields for minute, hour, day of week, day of month, and month.

Note

All schedules are in UTC timezone. Convert your local working hours to UTC before setting a schedule.

  • CET (UTC+1 winter): 6 PM local → 17:00 UTC

  • CEST (UTC+2 summer): 6 PM local → 16:00 UTC

Common schedule examples:

Intent

Cron expression

Plain English

Stop at 7 PM UTC on weekdays

0 19 * * 1-5

Monday–Friday at 19:00 UTC

Start at 7 AM UTC on weekdays

0 7 * * 1-5

Monday–Friday at 07:00 UTC

Stop every day at midnight

0 0 * * *

Every day at 00:00 UTC

Weekly cleanup on Friday

0 18 * * 5

Friday at 18:00 UTC

Tip

Create a paired Start-Stop for Dev environments: Stop at 19:00 UTC weekdays + Start at 07:00 UTC weekdays. This covers 12 off-hours per weekday ≈ 50% compute savings.

Step 3 — Save#

Click Save. The policy is active immediately and fires at the next scheduled time.

Supported resource types#

Azure:

  • Virtual Machines (VMs)

  • Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS)

  • Application Gateways

  • Azure Database for MySQL

  • Azure Database for PostgreSQL

  • Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) — node pool start/stop

AWS:

  • EC2 Instances

  • RDS Instances

  • Redshift Clusters

GCP:

  • Compute Engine instances

  • Managed Instance Groups (MIGs)

  • Cloud SQL instances

  • Cloud Storage buckets

  • Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) — Standard clusters only

Warning

GKE Autopilot clusters do not support Stop policies. Autopilot manages its own node lifecycle and cannot be controlled via external automation.

Policy execution results#

After each policy run, the execution summary shows one of three results per resource:

Result

Meaning

Processed

The action was applied successfully

Skipped

The resource was already in the correct state (already stopped / already running)

Failed

The action failed — usually a permissions issue on the cloud connection

Viewing policy history#

Open any policy → History tab shows a log of all past runs with: trigger time, resources processed, skipped, and failed.