I've for a long time set my cloud VMs to shutdown on idle. I usually use it to also justify running a much larger VM to cut down on build and test times. Just

I've for a long time set my cloud VMs to shutdown on idle. I usually use it to also justify running a much larger VM to cut down on build and test times. Just set a cron to run the shutdown command with a grace period. And then if you're working late, you just cancel the shutdown and the shutdown will be retried in a couple of hours. And have a script or command to just run the cloud API calls to boot the VM in the morning / when needed, and the environment boots in a minute or two. For other stuff I've been tempted to do a more complicated setup, with something like a micro-vm as a proxy, that will do the shutdown / activation on TCP connection, but haven't gotten around to it.