AWS CloudFormation power switch

AWS CloudFormation power switch allows you to shutdown and startup all EC2, ECS, RDS and
AutoScaling instances managed by one or more CloudFormation stacks.

install the power switch

to install the power switch, type:

pip install aws-cloudformation-power-switch

shutdown

to shutdown all instances managed by CloudFormation stacks starting with the name dev, type:

cfn-power-switch --dry-run --stack-name-prefix dev on

This will show you which EC2, RDS and AutoScaling instances will be shutdown. For Auto Scaling groups, the desired number of instances is set to 0. If the minimum is greater than 0, it will change the minimum setting too.

startup`

to startup all instances managed by a CloudFormation stacks starting with the name dev, type:

cfn-power-switch --dry-run --stack-name-prefix dev off

This will show you which EC2, RDS and AutoScaling instances will be started. The AutoScaling desired number of instances will be set the maximum desired instances. Remove the --dry-run and it will be activated.

deploy the power switch

To deploy the power switch as an AWS Lambda, type:

git clone https://github.com/binxio/aws-cloudformation-power-switch.git
cd aws-cloudformation-power-switch.git
aws cloudformation deploy \
	--capabilities CAPABILITY_IAM \
	--stack-name aws-cloudformation-power-switch \
	--template-file ./cloudformation/aws-cloudformation-power-switch.yaml

Demo

install the demonstration, type:

aws cloudformation deploy \
	--capabilities CAPABILITY_IAM \
	--stack-name aws-cloudformation-power-switch-demo \
	--template-file ./cloudformation/demo-stack.yaml

This deploy an ec2 instance, an autoscaling group and a RDS MySQL database instance, It will
shutdown down all EC2, RDS and Auto Scaling instances managed by CloudFormation stacks starting
with the name dev at 23:30 and start them backup at 7:30 in the morning.

To manual stop all the instance, type:

cfn-power-switch --verbose --stack-name-prefix aws-cloudformation-power-switch off

It will take few minutes before everything is shutdown and you can restart the stack.

to start everything back up, type:

cfn-power-switch --verbose --stack-name-prefix aws-cloudformation-power-switch off

It will take few minutes before everything is running again.

Do not forget to delete the stack:

aws cloudformation delete-stack --stack-name aws-cloudformation-power-switch-demo

Caveats

• The power switch will only start instances in stopped state, and stop instances in the availableorrunning` state. If it is transitioning between states, no action is taken.
• As CloudFormation does not place the aws:cloudformation: tags on RDS Aurora Clusters, we need to load all CloudFormation stacks and resources to find out whether we need to start or stop it. And listing all CloudFormation stacks is very, very slow...
• the ECS services desired count is read from the latest started [0-9]+ tasks event of that service
• the auto scaling group desired count is set to the max when powering on.