A couple months ago I released automation in our cloud environment to shutdown/startup resources who have been tagged with cron expressionS. It has been an incredibly flexible solution to manage and reduce the cost of resources which charge per time spent operating.

Not only do tags fit well into already existing work flows (CI/CD, policy), cron expressions give freedom to devs/sysadmins to choose whichever schedule they need. Also, this solution allows a central IT team to easily query and calculate duty cycle of any tagged resource, and relate that calculation to money saved.

I suggest using cron expression tagging for any scheduled resource automation, as it will likely be more flexible and more easily monitored than anything natively offered by the cloud vendor.