While managing their cloud infrastructure, organizations often need systematic (or scheduled) start-up or shutdown of Instances, maybe to ensure optimal resource utilization or adherence to operational timelines. The “Scheduled Instance Lifecycle Operations” feature in Apache CloudStack 4.19 seeks to address this need, offering a structured and automated approach to managing the state of VM instances.
This feature introduces Instance Schedule functionality, enabling Users to manage and automate the start, stop, and reboot actions of Instances based on a predefined schedule. The Instance Schedule, defined through a user-friendly API and UI, allows Users to specify actions, frequency (in both UNIX Cron and human-readable formats), and optionally, a time zone, providing a mechanism that is both flexible and precise. The architecture, natively driven by CloudStack, employs hypervisor-agnostic code, utilizing the VM manager for orchestrating Instance state transitions and ensuring that the defined schedules are adhered to with accuracy and reliability.
Feature Description
The Scheduled Instance Lifecycle Operation enable users to schedule five different actions related to Instance operations: start, stop, reboot, force stop and force reboot.
The scheduling frequency is determined using entries in the Unix Cron format, which facilitates custom schedule configurations. These entries are valid exclusively between specified start and end dates, enabling users to set a particular operation for a defined period.
To ensure the CloudStack database doesn’t become overloaded, records older than 30 days will be removed. Administrators can control this behaviour by adjusting the vmscheduler.jobs.expire.interval variable in Global Settings.
New Introduced APIs
New API calls have been added for users to use to automate or operate through CloudMonkey:
• createVMSchedule
• deleteVMSchedule
• listVMSchedule
• updateVMSchedule
Conclusion
This feature is part of Apache CloudStack 4.19 LTS. It will allow users to save time and streamline the workflow. It can also help users avoid waking up at night to perform these small operations, which can be disruptive and time-consuming. Users can optimize resource usage and minimize costs by scheduling these actions, improving overall productivity and efficiency.
Vishesh Jindal is a software engineer at ShapeBlue. He has experience in developing and managing cloud infrastructure. He has a particular interest in databases and has worked extensively on them.
When Vishesh is not working, he enjoys watching anime, playing DOTA, or working on an open-source project.
