Azure VM auto-shutdown scheduler

As of now you can automatically shutdown your VMs without having to use Azure Automation. Check it out!

Automatically shutdown VMs in Azure is a mandatory task to save time and money, for example in testing environments. Until now, you had to use Azure Automation to have your testing environment shutdown and deallocate. As of now there is a new feature called auto-shutdown scheduler that makes your lives way easier.

Auto-shutdown is a feature you can configure per VM. Just do the following steps:

  1. Go to VM management blade in Azure Primary portal
  2. Select the VM you want to enable auto-shutdown scheduler for
  3. Select auto-shutdown and configure the feature.


Until now I’ve already used Azure Automation runbooks that I’d scheduled so my testing environments could have been deallocated automatically in order to save computing hours and thus money. As of now I will always configure my auto-shutdown schedules per VM.

Oh, one thing left: Currently not all Azure locations already have the auto-shutdown feature enabled. Make sure to check it out for your environments.

Currently, not every Azure region has the auto-shutdown scheduler enabled, yet.

Edit 2016/11/25: In the meantime Azure VM auto-shutdown scheduler has been enabled in West Europe.

Enable Auto-shutdown scheduler


Kind regards,


Author: Tom Janetscheck

Cloud Security Enthusiast | Security Advocate

One thought on “Azure VM auto-shutdown scheduler”

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