Do you want to run short jobs on Amazon EC2 on a recurring schedule, but don’t want to pay for an instance running all the time?
Would you like to do this using standard Amazon AWS services without needing an external server to run and terminate the instance?
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is normally used to keep a reasonable number of instances running to handle measured or expected load (e.g., web site traffic, queue processing).
In this article I walk through the steps to create an Auto Scaling configuration that runs an instance on a recurring schedule (e.g., four times a day) starting up a pre-defined task and letting that instance shut itself down when it is finished. We tweak the Auto Scaling group so that this uses the minimum cost in instance run time, even though we may not be able to predict in advance exactly how long it will take to complete the job.
Here’s a high level overview for folks familiar with Auto Scaling: