If you are like me, I try to make my Azure MSDN subscription credits stretch the entire month. I’m typically just building labs to try out new features or to demonstrate SQL Server Failover Clusters in Azure. A lot of the time I am testing some pretty large instance sizes with plenty of premium storage. As you can imagine, you can burn through $150 pretty quick with a few GS5 instances running.

I try to be mindful and shutdown or destroy instances once I am done with them, but occasionally I’ll get pulled away for other business, only to log in the next day and see my credit has expired because I forgot to turn off the VMs.

I’m happy to see that it is now very easy to configure an automatic Shutdown of instances right in the Azure Portal.

Keep in mind however that this just shuts down the instance. If you have premium storage attached to it you will continue to pay for the Storage even if the instance is shut down.