Scheduling Amazon WorkSpaces
Can ZopNight schedule Amazon WorkSpaces?
WorkSpaces schedules stop and start desktops through the WorkSpaces API, but only AutoStop (hourly) billing responds: an AlwaysOn WorkSpace bills its flat monthly rate stopped or not. Hourly mode also carries a base fee near $10 a month that no schedule removes, and a stopped desktop resumes with apps and session intact.
How the stop works
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Behaviour | WorkSpace stopped and started via the WorkSpaces API on schedule. |
Example schedules
- 0 8 * * 1-5 — Business Hours Start: Start at 8:00 AM on weekdays
- 0 18 * * 1-5 — Business Hours Stop: Stop at 6:00 PM on weekdays
- 0 22 * * * — Night Shutdown: Stop at 10:00 PM every day
- 0 6 * * 1-5 — Morning Startup: Start at 6:00 AM on weekdays
- 0 20 * * 5 — Weekend Shutdown: Stop at 8:00 PM on Friday
- 0 7 * * 1 — Weekend Startup: Start at 7:00 AM on Monday
Two billing modes, one of them schedulable
Every WorkSpace runs in one of two modes. AlwaysOn bills a flat monthly rate regardless of use, and stopping it changes nothing on the invoice, making a schedule cosmetic. AutoStop bills by the hour of running time, and there the schedule does exactly what it promises. The first task before scheduling a WorkSpaces fleet is therefore an audit of billing modes, and the biggest saving available is often converting under-used AlwaysOn desktops to AutoStop rather than the schedule itself.
The base fee stays either way
AutoStop pricing is a fixed monthly infrastructure fee plus the hourly rate: for a Standard bundle, roughly $9.75 a month plus about 30 cents per running hour. The schedule eliminates hours, never the base fee. A desktop stopped 24/7 for a month still bills its monthly component, which is the number to use when deciding whether a rarely-used WorkSpace should instead be rebuilt on demand.
Sessions survive the stop
A stopped WorkSpace preserves its state: open applications and the desktop session come back on resume, closer to a laptop lid-close than a reboot. Resume takes on the order of a minute or two, so a start cron 15 minutes before shift start makes the wait invisible. User and root volumes persist regardless, and their storage is inside the bundle price rather than a separate line.
Where schedules beat the native idle timer
AutoStop already suspends a desktop after its idle timeout, but idle detection is defeated by anything that looks like activity, and the minimum granularity is coarse. A calendar stop at 19:00 is deterministic: the fleet is off at night and weekends no matter what a stray process is doing on screen.
Fleet-shaped arithmetic
Per-desktop numbers are small; fleets are not. A 200-seat AutoStop fleet that runs 50 hours a week instead of 168 avoids well over 20,000 desktop-hours a month. Schedules on WorkSpaces are a volume play.