Create Automation Policies#

policy Automation policies schedule automatic lifecycle actions on cloud resources — stopping resources outside of business hours, starting them in the morning, and cleaning up orphaned storage volumes. Policies are scoped to your Allocation Groups hierarchy.

Navigate: left navigation → Automation → Policies → “+ New Policy”.

Policy types#

Type

What it does

Start Policy

Starts (powers on) compute resources on a schedule

Stop Policy

Stops (powers off / deallocates) compute resources on a schedule

Unused Volumes

Deletes unattached storage volumes on a schedule

See Unused Volumes Policy for the dedicated guide including scoping recommendations and permissions required.

Creating a Start or Stop Policy#

Step 1 — General settings#

  • Policy name — descriptive name (e.g. “Stop Dev VMs - After Hours”)

  • Policy type — Start Policy or Stop Policy

  • Target scope — select a Group, Environment, or Project from your Allocation hierarchy; the policy applies to all matching resources within that scope

Step 2 — Schedule#

Use the visual cron picker with fields for minute, hour, day of week, day of month, and month.

Note

All schedules are in UTC timezone. Convert your local working hours to UTC before setting a schedule.

  • CET (UTC+1 winter): 6 PM local → 17:00 UTC

  • CEST (UTC+2 summer): 6 PM local → 16:00 UTC

Common schedule examples:

Intent

Cron expression

Plain English

Stop at 7 PM UTC on weekdays

0 19 * * 1-5

Monday–Friday at 19:00 UTC

Start at 7 AM UTC on weekdays

0 7 * * 1-5

Monday–Friday at 07:00 UTC

Stop every day at midnight

0 0 * * *

Every day at 00:00 UTC

Weekly cleanup on Friday

0 18 * * 5

Friday at 18:00 UTC

Tip

Create a paired Start-Stop for Dev environments: Stop at 19:00 UTC weekdays + Start at 07:00 UTC weekdays. This covers 12 off-hours per weekday ≈ 50% compute savings.

Quota and credits#

Each tenant has two automation limits:

Limit

Default

Policy instances

100 (total active policies across all types)

Monthly policy credits

10,000 (resets on the first of each month)

Every resource action (start, stop, or volume delete) performed by a policy consumes one credit. If the tenant exhausts its monthly credits, further policy executions are skipped until the monthly reset. Your current credit balance is visible in Tenant → Quota.

Step 3 — Save#

Click Save. The policy is active immediately and fires at the next scheduled time.

Supported resource types#

Azure:

  • Virtual Machines (VMs)

  • Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS)

  • Application Gateways

  • Azure Database for MySQL

  • Azure Database for PostgreSQL

  • Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) — node pool start/stop

AWS:

  • EC2 Instances

  • RDS Instances

  • Redshift Clusters

GCP:

  • Compute Engine instances

  • Managed Instance Groups (MIGs)

  • Cloud SQL instances

  • Cloud Storage buckets

  • Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) — Standard clusters only

Warning

GKE Autopilot clusters do not support Stop policies. Autopilot manages its own node lifecycle and cannot be controlled via external automation.

Policy execution results#

After each policy run, the execution summary shows one of three results per resource:

Result

Meaning

Processed

The action was applied successfully

Skipped

The resource was already in the correct state (already stopped / already running)

Failed

The action failed — usually a permissions issue on the cloud connection

Viewing policy history#

Open any policy → History tab shows a log of all past runs with: trigger time, resources processed, skipped, and failed.