Auto Shutdown and Start Amazon EC2 Instance

Can I automatically start and terminate my Amazon instance using Amazon API? Can you please describe how this can be done? I ideally need to start the instance and stop the instance at specified time intervals every day.

Just in case somebody stumbles on this ye old question, nowadays you can achieve the same thing by adding a schedule to an auto scaling group: increase the amount of instances in an auto scaling group to 1 at certain times and decrease it back to 0 afterwards.

And since this answer is getting a lot of views, I thought to link to a very helpful guide about this: Running EC2 Instances on a Recurring Schedule with Auto Scaling

You can try using the Amazon EC2 API tools directly. There are really only two commands you need: ec2-start-instances and ec2-stop-instances. Make sure that environment variables such as EC2_HOME, AWS_CREDENTIAL_FILE, EC2_CERT, EC2_PRIVATE_KEY, etc. are properly configured and all AWS credentials, certificate and private key files are in proper location - you can find more info in the AWS EC2 API tools documentation.

You can test the command by hand first and then, when everything works fine, configure Unix crontab or Scheduled Tasks on Windows. You can find the example below for the Linux /etc/crontab file (do not forget that all those environment variables mentioned above need to be present for 'your-account' user.

/etc/crontab
0 8     * * *   your-account ec2-start-instances <your_instance_id>
0 16    * * *   your-account ec2-stop-instances <your_instance_id>
# Your instance will be started at 8am and shutdown at 4pm.

I am a developer for the BitNami Cloud project, where we package the AWS tools (including the ones I mentioned) in a free, easy to use installer that you may want to try: BitNami CloudTools pack stack