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Overview — Schedules

Schedules lets you automate two types of recurring tasks on Instances:

  • Instance schedule: automatically start or stop an Instance at a preset time.
  • Instance snapshot schedule: automatically take a snapshot of an Instance on a recurring cycle.

Availability​

Schedules are available on both VPC types:

VPC TypeSchedules Support
General VPCYes
Specific VPCYes

Use Cases​

  • Cost savings: stop Instances outside business hours (for example, dev/test environments) and start them again at the beginning of the day.
  • Automated backup: take snapshots on a regular schedule without manual intervention.
  • Operational compliance: ensure Instances always run within committed service windows.

Key Limits​

Instance schedule (automatic start/stop):

  • Start/stop commands may execute up to 15 minutes later than the configured time.
  • The Start time and Stop time must be at least 15 minutes apart.
  • An Instance schedule cannot be edited after creation — to make changes, delete it and create a new one.

Instance snapshot schedule (automatic snapshot):

  • The snapshot time must be set at least 2 hours earlier than the desired snapshot time to allow the system to process it in time.
  • Each Instance can only belong to one snapshot schedule at a time.