A long waiting functionality is now available in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure: the Resource Scheduler. Now you can control the start and stop of OCI resources like Compute Instances and Autonomous Databases in OCI directly. This saves money and makes previous solutions with tags, cron commands by OCI-CLI, functions or 3rd-party tools unnecessary. The scheduler is located at tenancy level and can handle static or dynamic resources based on search criteria. As this is the First Release, sometime the schedule creation fails but the error box is empty, even when all required text field are filled out, creation was not possible. But again, for the first release not so bad. I miss actually the functionality to create more than one action in a schedule, for example to start /stop resources in one schedule and there is no event available to create a rule based on scheduler events.
Link to OCI documentation: Resource Scheduler (oracle.com)
Some use cases:
- Stop all Compute Instances in Compartment XY at 6PM every day
- Start Autonomus Databases tagged with XY at 7AM at workdays
- Stop all resources at the end of the week
1st – Enter Basic Information
Add a useful information what this scheduler task is doing.
2nd – Add resources
Add static or dynamic resources, filter based on compartment.
3rd – Create a schedule
Define the run time of the task, once daily, weekly etc. – take care, time is in UTC 24hr format. If you select weekly, you can add the days of week. A start and end date of the schedule is mandatory.
4th – Review and Save
Review the settings, press create. To get notified when a schedule has ran, you can use the regular OCI event handling with notifications.
Recap
The scheduler is a useful extension to easily manage resources that are not used 24/7. It currently has a few teething issues, but it is the “first release” 🙂