When it comes to managing cloud costs, a common first instinct for DevOps or infrastructure teams is to reach for a script. After all, if you can automate instance start/stop cycles with a few lines of PowerShell or Bash, why not?
At CLOUD TOGGLE, we hear this all the time: teams spinning up automation in-house to handle VM scheduling. It feels like a quick fix, but is it really the right approach?
The DIY Scripting Route
There’s no doubt scripting has its place. Whether it’s Jenkins jobs, Puppet, or custom shell scripts, engineers often fall back on what they know best: code. It gives them control, it can be built fast, and it scratches the itch of “just let me solve the problem myself.”
And sure, if you’ve got one environment with a handful of VMs, maybe it works fine. But what happens when you’re dealing with hundreds of instances, multiple teams, and workloads spread across regions? Suddenly, the “quick script” needs maintenance, updates, and constant babysitting. What started as a shortcut becomes another system to manage.
Why Scripts Fall Short
The cloud is meant to democratize infrastructure – finance, marketing, data science, and engineering teams alike can spin up what they need. But the flip side is that they don’t always remember to turn things off.
If your answer is “we’ll give them a script,” you’re not really empowering anyone. Scripts require technical knowledge, training, and ongoing support. And for IT, embedding DevOps engineers into every team to keep the wheels turning just doesn’t scale.
What’s missing is a way for anyone to manage cloud costs without learning to code. That’s where purpose-built tools shine.
A Smarter Way: CLOUD TOGGLE
That’s exactly why we built CLOUD TOGGLE. Instead of asking your developers to maintain scripts, CLOUD TOGGLE gives you:
- A simple, intuitive interface that any user can adopt in minutes
- Centralized scheduling and governance, without custom code
- The flexibility to “toggle” resources on or off, or pause schedules, whenever they’re needed
One of our customers put it best: “We freed up our DevOps team to work on higher-value projects. CLOUD TOGGLE takes care of the schedules, and our users can manage their own workloads without waiting on IT.”
The Bottom Line
Just because you can write a script, doesn’t mean you should. With CLOUD TOGGLE, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel – or maintain it. Instead, you get an always-available, easy-to-use platform that helps teams cut waste and take ownership of their cloud usage.
The result? Lower costs, happier teams, and DevOps freed from babysitting homegrown scripts.
