Best Practices for Automating EC2 Instance Shutdowns in AWS

[orbar]

Hello SAS Community,

We are in the process of moving some services to the AWS cloud and have around 8 SAS instances running. Our goal is to create an automation script to shut these instances down during off-hours to save costs.

Here are a few specific questions we have:

1. Shutdown Mechanism: When shutting down an EC2 instance using AWS commands, does it perform a graceful shutdown similar to a normal OS shutdown, or is it more like pulling the power cord?
2. Shutdown Order: Is there a best practice for the order in which to shut down and start up instances? For example, should databases be shut down last and started first?
3. Automation Tools: What are the recommended tools or methods for automating this process? We've looked into AWS Lambda and AWS Systems Manager but would appreciate guidance or examples.
4. Handling Dependencies: How do we ensure that dependent services are shut down in the correct order to prevent issues?

Here is what we are currently considering:

• Using AWS Lambda triggered by CloudWatch Events to stop instances.
• Ensuring that our shutdown sequence handles dependencies correctly (e.g., web servers -> application servers -> databases).

Any insights, best practices, or sample scripts would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance for your help!

[orbar]

Any idea anyone?

[gwootton]

You could look at using SAS_lsm to manage gracefully shutting down the SAS 9 services in the correct order.

https://github.com/sassoftware/SAS-lsm/tree/master

For Viya 3.x, there is viya-ark to do this:

https://github.com/sassoftware/viya-ark

For Viya 4, there is a supplied cronjob to stop Viya.

I'm on Azure and not AWS, but I use a scheduled script that runs a graceful stop of SAS services (like SAS_lsm on SAS 9 and viya-ark on Viya) and then stops and deallocates the VMs using the CLI (or in the case of Kuberentes, stops the cluster).

I expect that VM shutdown is graceful and not like pulling the power cord, though AWS support may be able to provide more detail on that functionality.