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Simple Azure management using CloudMonix

We've been using CloudMonix for a while to manage and monitor our Microsoft Azure assets. By "we" I mean both Inner Drive Technology (home of The Daily Parker) and Holden (my day job).

CloudMonix recently added a new feature that automates virtual machine (VM) management. See, Microsoft charges for VMs by the hour. So if you have a VM that is only used at specific times, you're wasting money by having it run all the time.

A great example: Our continuous integration (CI) server, which builds and tests our (Holden's) applications every time a developer publishes a change to our master Git repository. Typically no one is making changes outside of business hours. So most of the time, the CI server just sits there, doing nothing.

Last week I configured CloudMonix to shut down our CI server every night at 6pm and wake it up at 7am the next morning. I only made two minor errors.

First, shutting down a VM in Azure makes its IP address evaporate, which screwed up some of the tests that connect to Salesforce. Second, the CI server runs a weekly build and smoke test early Monday morning, so we know first thing that the build is OK for the week. It was running at 4:15; I had to move it to 7:15. And all is good.

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