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5 Best Practices to Adjust Your Deployments for the Holidays

By Rob Waggoner

The holidays are such a wonderful time of the year because we get the opportunity to spend more time with family and friends. If your office will be closed for additional days over these holiday periods, this would be an excellent time to check your scheduler to ensure you can save a few extra dollars during those times. Let’s start with the Thanksgiving holiday, Thursday, November 28, and Friday, November 29th. Most businesses take these two days off, so how can we ensure we aren’t running an infrastructure for these two days when no one is working?

Here are a few ways you can reduce costs during specific holidays when your infrastructure will not be needed.

1. Create specific schedules for specific days. You will use the Regular schedule as opposed to the Work Week schedule. The thing to keep in mind with the Regular Scheduler is that you define a date and time that it runs. I configure many schedules to run only once. This way, I get a specific behavior for that one day, without changing my daily schedule and forgetting to change it back.

2. If you want to turn everything off for Thursday, Thanksgiving Day, instead of modifying an existing schedule, you can turn everything off 15 minutes after everything is turned on by the regular schedule. Yes, you will pay for 15 minutes of runtime, but isn’t that cheaper than forgetting to set the normal schedule back after the Thanksgiving holiday? I know that may sound funny, but if you set a schedule for a specific day, the schedule will only run on that particular day, and it will save you the runtime cost of that day.

3. If you want to modify your runtime schedule for Friday as well, the day after Thanksgiving, it will require a separate scheduled item. Yes, the schedules can be that granular. This way, you define the specific action for each specific day. It also makes it easier to understand what’s going on and easier to clean up the schedules after they’ve run.

4. Before you delete the schedules you created for Thanksgiving, remember that you can modify them to run for any December holidays as well. People usually take two or more days off for December holidays, so look at Thanksgiving as a dry run for your December schedule and get a jump on planning!

5. You don’t need to modify the auto-scaler if you turn off your whole deployment. The auto-scaler runs on the RDSMGMT server, so if you turn off the RDSMGMT server, the auto-scaler won’t run. Now, remember that if your RDSMGMT server is off, you should turn everything else off as well because no one can log in without the RDSMGMT server running.

Not only will these ideas reduce your runtime costs, but they may also encourage your staff to take a break. It’s easy to find articles such as "More people are taking time off, and that's good for business" by SHRM that proves people work too many hours and do not take the break they need and can end up getting burned out. Turning off your deployment is one way you can encourage your team to enjoy their time off from work.

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Tags: MyCloudIT Best Practices, Best Practices

azure cost optimization

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