How to turn on/off cloud instances during office hours

Approach

You could always roll your own solution, insofar most cloud providers offer a respective API to start/stop instances on demand (or even on schedule), which is what those management services are actually using as well of course - the AmazonEC2 Java interface offers all relevant methods for example (amongst many others), specifically:

• StartInstances()
• StopInstances()
• RebootInstances()

Via Scripting (EC2)

The most simple approach for this regarding Amazon EC2 would be to craft yourself some Python scripts by means of the excellent boto (An integrated interface to current and future infrastructural services offered by Amazon Web Services), which exposes all EC2 methods mentioned above; you could then start those scripts on demand or via your operating system scheduler.

Via Continuous Integration / Automation (EC2)

Another option would be to facilitate a continuous integration server as an automation engine (a sometimes overlooked aspect of these systems), in case you happen to run one anyway; it would allow you to both start/stop instances on demand or scheduled similar to cron.

We do exactly this by means of the Bamboo AWS Plugin (it's Open Source and the code is available on Bitbucket), see my answer to How to start and stop an Amazon EC2 instance programmatically in java for more details on this approach. While Atlassian Bamboo is a commercial offering, there should be something similar available for popular Open Source CI solutions like e.g. Jenkins as well.

Azure

REST:

You can do this to Azure deployments by using the Windows Azure Service Management REST API. Because it is REST you can use most programming languages to access it.

You could have an application running on your local machine that schedules calls to these services to delete at a certain time at the end of office hours and then create your service again in the morning.

PowerShell:

Or you can manage your deployments in the same way but instead of using REST you can use Azure PowerShell cmdlets. I have done this way myself and it works nicely.

To help you get started there is a nice tutorial on how to do use PowerShell to deploy Azure applications.

also if you didn't already know I should also mention there is a 3month free trial with Azure if you are simply looking for cutting costs whilst developing.