Hacker News Reader

If you're using IaC and have it set up in a CI/CD pipeline, you could also achieve the same by having a cronjob set a flag outside of work hours, and use conditionals in your IaC based on the value of that flag (e.g., for Terraform `count = var.scale_down ? 0 : 1`)

View on HN

There were a few reasons why I couldn't use IaC:

1) Using conditionals to achieve this usually makes terraform unmanageable specially if your terraform is complex.

2) Sometimes you'd need to do more complex steps to save some money, for example in case of ElastiCache you'd need to snapshot/delete/create.

3) Using terraform in a Lambda to schedule this was not straightforward (in my current company) so I gave up making it work :D

Reply on news.ycombinator.com