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We have a number of Service Fabric clusters provisioned in Azure, for dev and testing. I would like to find a way to 'pause' these over night to save paying for them when they're not being used.

This seems to be what the Azure Dev Labs are for, but as far as I can see they don't support Service Fabric Clusters.

I'm thinking of writing a script to completely tear these environments down at night and rebuild them in the morning, but before doing that I'm wondering if there are any better ways.

Code Monkey
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Service Fabric clusters cannot be safely "paused". If you shut down all VMs, there is a chance that the cluster's state - the applications and their data - will be lost.

If you don't mind starting with a fresh set of clusters every morning, it's pretty straightforward to automate. You can define your environments using ARM templates and write a short script to provision, then create another script to delete the resource groups at the end of the day, which will remove the VMs and all associated resources.

Sean McKenna
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  • Yes, but by default, we use the temporary disk for data storage. If you turn off a VM and start it up again later, it may be placed on a different host and that state will be lost. If that happens to enough machines in the cluster, you'll have data loss. It's not guaranteed but it is possible, so it's best not to count on the state surviving such a shutdown. – Sean McKenna Aug 01 '16 at 16:44