In today’s fast-paced business environment, managing cloud resources efficiently is crucial to optimizing costs and enhancing security. One effective strategy is to provision resources at the start of the business day and decommission them at the end of the day. This approach helps in reducing hosting costs and minimizing the surface area of any security risks.
Why Automate Resource Management?
Many businesses operate on a standard business day schedule, typically from 9 AM to 5 PM. However, resources such as virtual machines, databases, and storage accounts often remain active 24/7. This continuous operation can lead to unnecessary costs and increased security risks, especially if the resources are not adequately monitored outside business hours.
Automating the provisioning and decommissioning of resources provides several benefits:
- Cost Reduction: By only running resources during business hours, you can significantly reduce hosting costs.
- Security: Decommissioning resources when not in use reduces the attack surface, thus minimizing potential security risks.
- Efficiency: Automation reduces the manual overhead of managing resources, allowing your team to focus on more critical tasks.
In this blog, we will explore how you can use Azure DevOps pipeline schedules to automate this process.
The Solution
By leveraging pipeline schedules, businesses can automate the provisioning of resources at the start of the business day and decommission them at the end of the day. More about pipeline schedules can be found here – https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/process/scheduled-triggers?view=azure-devops&tabs=yaml
Schedules are added to your pipelines as a cron job where you can specify the time and the days that the pipeline will be triggered. The sample cron job below will trigger the pipeline to run at 7.00am UTC for every work day.
The solution involves two pipelines, one is used for provisioning your resources which is a typical YAML pipeline that you would normally develop to provision your resources. The other pipeline is used for decommissioning your resources. This pipeline uses Azure CLI commands to delete resources by type which you can specify as a variable string. In the example below, this will delete all VM’s, NIC’s and Storage Accounts in the specified Azure resource group.
Source code for a working example can be found here – https://github.com/connectedcircuits/schedule-pipelines. This sample will provision a storage account at 7:00am NZ time and then decommission the resources in the specified Azure Resource Group at 6:00pm NZ time every working day.
You can also add approval gates to the pipelines for added control of provisioning or decommissioning the resources.
Conclusion
By leveraging Azure DevOps pipeline schedules, you can automate the provisioning and decommissioning of resources to align with your business hours. This not only helps in reducing hosting costs but also minimizes the surface area of any security risks. Implement this strategy in your workflow to ensure efficient and secure resource management.
Start automating your resource management today to maximize efficiency and security in your cloud environment!
Enjoy…
