# Schedule GCP Memorystore: Stop Paying for Idle Redis at Night > ZopNight schedules Memorystore Instances on GCP 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/gcp/memorystore Published: 2026-07-01 · Author: avinash-gaurav · Tags: zopnight, gcp, database, scheduling --- Most of what teams spend on Memorystore Instances 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 Memorystore Instances 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 Memorystore Instances cost more than they should Cloud providers bill Memorystore Instances 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 ($0.05–$1.50/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 Memorystore Instances safely ZopNight handles the Delete and recreate with snapshot via Memorystore API on every Memorystore Instances 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 Memorystore Instances that are running but doing nothing. In practice the setup is: Connect your GCP project. ZopNight discovers all Memorystore Redis and Memcached instances; Define schedules per instance or label-based groups; ZopNight exports a Redis RDB snapshot, then deletes the instance to stop charges; Before business hours, ZopNight recreates the instance from the snapshot. If you run Memorystore Instances you probably also run [Cloud SQL](https://zop.dev/zopnight/gcp/cloud-sql), [Compute Engine](https://zop.dev/zopnight/gcp/compute-engine), [GKE](https://zop.dev/zopnight/gcp/gke), 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 Memorystore Instances The loop that does this is deliberately mechanical, and it starts read-only. You connect GCP with a read-only role, and ZopNight discovers every Memorystore Instances 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 Memorystore Instances 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 GCP with a read-only role. Nothing is scheduled or changed at this stage. - Let ZopNight discover your Memorystore Instances 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 ### Why does ZopNight delete and recreate instead of stopping Memorystore? GCP Memorystore does not support a native stop/start operation. To eliminate charges, the instance must be deleted. ZopNight exports an RDB snapshot before deletion and recreates from it, preserving your data and configuration. ### Is my Redis data safe during this process? Yes. ZopNight creates an RDB snapshot before any deletion. The snapshot is stored in Cloud Storage and used to restore data when the instance is recreated. ZopNight verifies snapshot integrity before proceeding. ### Does the IP address change after recreation? By default, GCP may assign a different IP. ZopNight can reserve the same IP range to minimize connection string changes. We recommend using service discovery or config management for connection strings. ### How long does it take to recreate a Memorystore instance? Memorystore Redis instances take 5-15 minutes to create depending on size. ZopNight schedules recreation with enough lead time for your workday. Data import from snapshot adds 1-5 minutes. ### What about Memorystore for Memcached? Memcached is a pure cache with no persistence. ZopNight deletes and recreates Memcached instances without snapshots since data is ephemeral. Your application repopulates the cache on startup.