Guide to scheduling Azure SQL Database pause and resume. Reduce non-production Azure SQL costs by pausing databases outside business hours.
This is the practical version, the one you can follow in a single sitting. It starts read-only, touches no production resource by default, and every step is reversible, so there is no point at which you are committed to something you cannot undo. Budget about 10 minutes. Before you start you will want: An Azure subscription with SQL databases; Service principal with Contributor access; A ZopNight account.
The steps
- Register ZopNight service principal.
- Discover SQL databases.
- Identify pauseable databases.
- Create pause/resume schedules.
- Set up dependency ordering with app services.
Why this is safe to do today
The reason this is a low-stakes change is that nothing here is destructive. Scheduling stops and starts resources; it never deletes them, and your data persists across a stop exactly as it does across a normal reboot. Production is excluded by default, actions run in dependency order, and every state change is logged with what triggered it.
If you want the fuller context behind this task, the FinOps guide covers where it fits, and the AWS EC2 scheduling page shows the same loop applied to a specific resource.
Getting started
Getting started is intentionally low-stakes:
- Connect your cloud provider with a read-only role. Nothing is scheduled or changed at this stage.
- Let ZopNight discover your non-production resources and review exactly what it found, filtered by account, region, and status.
- Create a schedule in your timezone and attach the non-production resources or groups you want it to cover.
- Watch the first cycle run, with Slack, Teams, or Google Chat notifications on every start, stop, and failure, then layer in idle cleanup and guided rightsizing.
Production stays excluded by default throughout, and because discovery and recommendations are read-only, you can prove the value before you enable a single action.
Questions we get a lot.
If yours isn't here, email us and we'll answer directly.
Does pausing Azure SQL delete my data?
No. Pausing an Azure SQL Serverless database stops compute billing while preserving all data on storage. The database endpoint remains the same. When resumed, it is available within seconds.
Can I schedule Azure SQL Managed Instances?
Managed Instances do not support pause/resume natively. ZopNight can stop dependent application resources while keeping the managed instance running, or scale down to a smaller service tier during off-hours.