You can use AWS Data Pipeline to programmatically start and stop your EC2 instances at scheduled instances. Data Pipeline uses AWS technologies and runs AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) commands on a set schedule with no external dependencies. Data Pipeline writes logs to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and runs in the context of an IAM role, which eliminates key management requirements. Data Pipeline is also cost effective. For example, the Data Pipeline free tier can be used to stop and start instances once per day. For more information, see

AWS Data Pipeline Pricing.

Note: An Amazon EC2 t1.micro instance is started as the host environment for execution of a data pipeline. EC2 instances started for this purpose run for a default timeout period of 50 minutes. All resources used to host execution of a data pipeline accrue to your account. Executing pipelines to stop and restart an EC2 instance for 100 minutes or less uses the same amount of resources as are used by letting an EC2 t1.micro instance continue to run.

You should stop and restart one or more EC2 t1.micro or larger instances for more than 100 minutes (50 minutes to stop, and 50 minutes to start) to be sure that the method described in this article doesn't consume more resources than are conserved.

Data Pipeline requires that you create a customer managed policy for the DataPipelineDefaultResourceRole

role if the default policy associated with this role is the AmazonEC2RoleforDataPipelineRole AWS managed policy, because AWS managed policies are read-only. If the policy attached to your DataPipelineDefaultResourceRole is not an AWS managed policy, then you don't need to create a customer managed policy. Instead, you can edit the policy assigned to theDataPipelineDefaultResourceRolerole.