Developer Managed Azure VMs To Save Money

Can developers manage their VM uptime and save some money? Yes!

Similar to OMS, each VM in Azure has an option to add a shutdown time. This is especially helpful for developer VMs. The schedule for this is set at each VM so if you have developers in different time zones, you can manage that schedule on the VM for that developer. But I hear you asking "What about turning them on?". That's also simple. Make the VM "owner" a VM contributor for that VM and they can see and start it in the Azure Portal whenever they need it.

As you can see, "Dan" is a Virtual Machine Contributor so he can turn it on and off when he likes. A Virtual Machine Contributor has more permissions than a Virtual Machine Administrator. You can find out more here. To set this up, go to the VM you would like to manage.

Click on "auto-shutdown".

Set Enabled to On, set a time and time zone, and also add in an email address. The email portion of this is especially handy as it gives you a way to prolong the shutdown via an email link. An example of an email is below.

I can postpone the shutdown a bit or skip it all togher if I want. Otherwise, it'll shut it down and stop billing while I'm not working (non-premium disks only I think for the moment).