# Schedule Azure AKS: Scale Node Pools to Zero Outside Business Hours > ZopNight schedules AKS Clusters on Azure to run on your team's hours and stop the rest of the time. Read-only setup, dependency-aware, production excluded by default. Source: https://zop.dev/zopnight/azure/aks Published: 2026-07-01 · Author: avinash-gaurav · Tags: zopnight, azure, kubernetes, scheduling --- Most of what teams spend on AKS Clusters in non-production is spent while nobody is watching. In a development, staging, or QA account these resources are billed for every hour they exist, but the people who use them work a fraction of those hours. Nights, weekends, holidays, and the long tail of "we'll get back to that environment next sprint" all meter at full price. ZopNight closes that gap by scheduling your AKS Clusters to run on your team's hours and stop the rest of the time, without touching your data and without a migration. It is the most direct lever in [FinOps](https://zop.dev/learn/finops), and for teams comparing tools it is where ZopNight pulls ahead of dashboard-first platforms like [CloudHealth](https://zop.dev/compare/cloudhealth-vs-zopnight). ## Why AKS Clusters cost more than they should Cloud providers bill AKS Clusters by the hour whether or not anyone is using them, and most non-production fleets default to running 24/7 out of habit rather than need. At typical on-demand rates ($0.10–$5.00/hr) an always-on instance quietly bills the same on a Tuesday afternoon as it does at 3 AM on a Sunday. Here is the shape of it. Say a box runs at a typical on-demand rate of $0.17 an hour. Left on around the clock that is about $124 a month, because a month is roughly 730 hours. Confine it to a single-shift work week, about 50 hours, and you pay for 50 hours instead of 730. Your own rate and hours will differ, but the ratio is the point: in non-production, most of the meter runs while nobody is working. The instinct is usually to reach for a smaller instance type. But rightsizing only helps a resource that is genuinely too big; it does nothing for a correctly-sized resource that simply runs when no one is around. The larger, easier win is refusing to pay for the hours nobody is working, and it carries none of the performance risk of down-sizing a box that might spike tomorrow. ## Stopping and starting AKS Clusters safely ZopNight handles the Stop cluster / Scale node pools to zero via AKS API on every AKS Clusters in scope, in dependency order so nothing comes up before what it depends on. A scheduled stop preserves your data exactly as a normal power-off would; ZopNight never terminates or deletes the resource, and idle detection watches CPU, network, and disk signals to surface the AKS Clusters that are running but doing nothing. In practice the setup is: Connect your Azure subscription. ZopNight discovers all AKS clusters and node pools; Define schedules per cluster or per node pool (e.g., dev stops at 7 PM); ZopNight stops the cluster or scales user node pools to zero via AKS API; Before business hours, ZopNight restarts the cluster and verifies workload health. If you run AKS Clusters you probably also run [Virtual Machines](https://zop.dev/zopnight/azure/virtual-machines), [SQL Database](https://zop.dev/zopnight/azure/sql-database), [VM Scale Sets](https://zop.dev/zopnight/azure/vm-scale-sets), and scheduling them together is where the dependency ordering earns its keep. Related reading: [scheduling](https://zop.dev/solutions/scheduling) and [cost optimization](https://zop.dev/solutions/cost-optimization). ## How ZopNight schedules AKS Clusters The loop that does this is deliberately mechanical, and it starts read-only. You connect Azure with a read-only role, and ZopNight discovers every AKS Clusters across your regions and accounts. It records a per-action permission verdict for each one, so you can see where it can list a resource but not yet stop it, and you review that inventory, filter it by status or type, and search for the specific resources you care about before anything is scheduled. Scheduling itself is a cron you write once in plain terms, stop at 7 PM, start at 8 AM on weekdays, pinned to your timezone so the jobs fire at local business hours rather than UTC. A weekly 24-hour grid shows the schedule visually so you catch gaps and overlaps before you save, and an estimate of active versus inactive hours appears before you commit. Resources attach individually or bundle into groups like "dev-cluster" or "staging-db" so a whole environment follows one cadence. Actions run in dependency order, so a database comes up before the app server that depends on it. When something needs to stay up, an override forces a AKS Clusters ON or OFF for a defined window, carries a reason so teammates understand why it exists, and expires automatically so nothing is left running by accident. If a start or stop fails, ZopNight retries up to three times and falls back to a dead-letter queue rather than silently dropping the action, and every state change lands in an audit trail that records whether a schedule, an override, or a specific user triggered it. ## Getting started Getting started is intentionally low-stakes: - Connect Azure with a read-only role. Nothing is scheduled or changed at this stage. - Let ZopNight discover your AKS Clusters 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. ## Frequently asked questions ### Can I stop an entire AKS cluster? Yes. AKS supports full cluster stop/start. When stopped, the control plane and all nodes are deallocated. ZopNight uses this for dev clusters where no component needs to stay running. ### What about the AKS system node pool? AKS requires at least one system node pool with at least one node. ZopNight can stop the entire cluster (including system pool) or scale only user node pools to zero while keeping the system pool running. ### How long does it take to start a stopped AKS cluster? AKS cluster start typically takes 3-5 minutes. ZopNight schedules starts with enough lead time for your team. Node pool scaling is faster, typically 2-3 minutes. ### Does stopping AKS affect persistent volumes? No. Azure managed disks backing PersistentVolumeClaims are preserved. When the cluster restarts and pods are rescheduled, they reattach to the same disks with all data intact. ### Can I schedule AKS virtual nodes (ACI)? Yes. ZopNight can scale workloads running on virtual nodes (Azure Container Instances) to zero replicas. Since ACI is consumption-based, scaling to zero eliminates all charges immediately.