Help Center/ Cloud Operations Center/ Best Practices/ Saving Costs Through Scheduled Startup and Shutdown on COC

Updated on 2026-03-12 GMT+08:00

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Saving Costs Through Scheduled Startup and Shutdown on COC

Scenarios

If your services have obvious daily peak and off-peak hours, such as gaming, e-commerce, online education, media entertainment, and data analysis, you can use the COC scheduled startup and shutdown function to reduce resource waste caused by idle ECS instances during non-peak hours. Automated O&M orchestration and scheduled policies enable on-demand startup and shutdown of resources and unattended operation, greatly improving O&M efficiency and reducing cloud resource operations costs.

Solutions

This section describes how to use the scheduled O&M function of COC to automatically start and stop ECS instances at a scheduled time.

You are advised to group instances and bind a unified tag to the instances that need to be started or stopped at a specified time every day. For example, you can group instances by whether to start or stop them every day. After instances are grouped by tag, you can select the corresponding tag to perform unified operations on all instances under the tag when executing scheduled tasks in batches. This greatly improves the management and execution efficiency.

Figure 1 Grouping by tag

In this case, you can use the scheduled startup and shutdown function of COC to periodically manage instances with specific tags.

Figure 2 Scheduled O&M process

The ECS support multiple billing modes. The ECS with different billing modes have different shutdown policies. For details, see How Can I Stop an ECS from Being Billed?

Prerequisites

You have registered a Huawei account, enabled Huawei Cloud services, and logged in.
You have created a shift in the shift schedule management module.

Step 1: Add a Resource Tag

Log in to COC.
In the navigation pane, choose Resources > Application and Resource Management.
Select target ECS instances, click in the tag column, and then click Tag Management.

If the tag column is not displayed in the resource list, click on the right of the filter box and select Label.
Figure 3 Managing tags
Click Add Tag to add a tag.

Figure 4 Adding a tag
- Key: Enter machine.
- Value: Enter Stop.
Click OK. The tag is added.

After adding a tag, you can filter resources by tag key or value.

Step 2: Create a Scheduled Task

Create a scheduled shutdown task and a scheduled startup task.

In the navigation pane, choose Resource O&M > Automated O&M.
In the Routine O&M area, click Scheduled O&M.
Click Create Task.
On the displayed page, set the basic information. Set Task to StopECS and retain the default values for other parameters.

Figure 5 Setting basic information

Set the scheduled task rule by referring to Table 1. For details about the parameters, see Creating Scheduled Tasks.

Figure 6 Setting a scheduled shutdown rule
Click to enlarge

**Table 1** Scheduled shutdown rule description
Parameter	Example Value	Description
Time Zone	GMT+08:00	Select the time zone where the scheduled task is executed from the drop-down list.
Scheduled Type	Periodic execution	Execute the task based on the specified rule until the rule expires.
Execution Time	Cron 0 0 23 * * ?	Set it using a time expression. For details, see Using Cron Expressions. *0 0 23 * ?** indicates that the shutdown task is executed at 23:00 every day.
Rule Ended	-	Configure the end time of the rule. The scheduled task is executed periodically based on the user-defined execution period until the rule end time.

If Task Type is set to Jobs, set the task by referring to Table 2.

Figure 7 Selecting a job
Click to enlarge

Figure 8 Selecting ECS instances
Click to enlarge

**Table 2** Job task configuration description
Parameter	Example Value	Description
Jobs	Stop_ECS under Public Jobs	Select a job from the drop-down list. You can select a custom job or public job.
IAM Agency	ServiceAgencyForCOC	To prevent scheduled task execution failures due to insufficient agency permissions, the IAM agency is set to ServiceAgencyForCOC by default, and you need to apply for the action permission of iam:agencies:pass.
Target Instance Mode	Consistent for all steps	All tasks are executed on the selected instances using the same batch policy.
Job Execution Procedure	-	Use default steps of public jobs.
Target Instance	Target ECS	Click Add, filter instances by tag, and select the target ECS instances.
Batch Policy	Auto-batch	The selected instances on which you want to perform operations are automatically divided into multiple batches based on the preset rule.

Set Manual Review.

**Table 3** Parameters for manual review
Parameter	Example Value	Description
Manual Review	On	After this function is enabled, the task needs to be reviewed. For details, see Reviewing Scheduled O&M Tasks.
Reviewer	Shift	Select a shift scenario and corresponding roles from the drop-down lists. For details about how to configure a shift, see Shift Schedule Management.
Notification Mode	Default	Same as that selected in the reviewer subscription function. For details about how to set the default notification mode, see Configuring the Notification Mode for a Subscriber.

In the navigation pane, choose Resource O&M > Automated O&M.
In the Routine O&M area, click Scheduled O&M.
Click Create Task.
On the displayed page, set the basic information. Set Task to StartECS and retain the default values for other parameters.

Figure 9 Setting basic information

Set the scheduled task rule by referring to Table 4. For details about the parameters, see Creating Scheduled Tasks.

Figure 10 Setting a scheduled startup rule
Click to enlarge

**Table 4** Scheduled startup rule description
Parameter	Example Value	Description
Time Zone	GMT+08:00	Select the time zone where the scheduled task is executed from the drop-down list.
Scheduled Type	Periodic execution	Execute the task based on the specified rule until the rule expires.
Execution Time	Cron 0 0 8 * * ?	Set it using a time expression. For details, see Using Cron Expressions. *0 0 8 * ?** indicates that the startup task is executed at 08:00 every day.
Rule Ended	-	Configure the end time of the rule. The scheduled task is executed periodically based on the user-defined execution period until the rule end time.

If Task Type is set to Jobs, set the task by referring to Table 5.

Figure 11 Selecting a job
Click to enlarge

Figure 12 Selecting ECS instances
Click to enlarge

**Table 5** Job task configuration description
Parameter	Example Value	Description
Jobs	Start_ECS under Public Jobs	Select a job from the drop-down list. You can select a custom job or public job.
IAM Agency	ServiceAgencyForCOC	To prevent scheduled task execution failures due to insufficient agency permissions, the IAM agency is set to ServiceAgencyForCOC by default, and you need to apply for the action permission of iam:agencies:pass.
Target Instance Mode	Consistent for all steps	All tasks are executed on the selected instances using the same batch policy.
Job Execution Procedure	-	Use default steps of public jobs.
Target Instance	Target ECS	Click Add, filter instances by tag, and select the target ECS instances.
Batch Policy	Auto-batch	The selected instances on which you want to perform operations are automatically divided into multiple batches based on the preset rule.

Set Manual Review.

**Table 6** Parameters for manual review
Parameter	Example Value	Description
Manual Review	On	After this function is enabled, the task needs to be reviewed. For details, see Reviewing Scheduled O&M Tasks.
Reviewer	Shift	Select a shift scenario and corresponding roles from the drop-down lists. For details about how to configure a shift, see Shift Schedule Management.
Notification Mode	Default	Same as that selected in the reviewer subscription function. For details about how to set the default notification mode, see Configuring the Notification Mode for a Subscriber.

Step 3: Verify the Execution Result

In the scheduled O&M task list, view the scheduled task created in Step 2: Create a Scheduled Task.

Figure 13 Viewing the scheduled task
After the scheduled task is approved, check that the task is effective.
Until the scheduled time is reached, check that the instances are stopped.

Figure 14 Scheduled shutdown
Until the scheduled time is reached, check that the instances automatically start.

The scheduled startup and shutdown tasks will be automatically executed based on the scheduled policy.

Figure 15 Scheduled startup