The Tao of Mac
May 25th 2017, at lunchtime · 3 min read
Postponing Azure VM Auto-Shutdown From Your iPhone
I normally use Azure Devtest Labs for managing the remote environments I work in, but now and then I have to set up standalone VMs outside a lab, and the first thing I do in the case of a cost-intensive resource (like, say, a GPU-enabled machine where I’m training a neural network1) is set up an auto-shutdown timer (usually for around dinner time).
This is supported on all VMs now – automatic power-on isn’t yet supported outside Devtest Labs, which is sad, but I’m hoping it will surface some time in the future.
The one catch with this approach is that I often need to keep working for a while, and I’m invariably not logged in to the right subscription (or even to the portal itself) when auto-shutdown kicks in, so I’m often caught by surprise (often when I’m actually logged in directly to the machine).
Going over to the portal in a hurry and trying to find the right machine amidst hundreds of resources is a major pain and completely breaks my flow, so in order to avoid chagrin and interruptions I’ve been looking into ways to have a bit more control over auto-shutdown.
That led me to investigate Azure infrastructure web hooks – you can define hooks for metrics alerts, and as it happens Devtest Labs also has an auto-shutdown hook. After a little searching and asking around (because it’s still somewhat hard to find this in the docs outside the context of Devtest Labs), I figured out that the Schedules > Auto-shutdown web hook available for any VM works exactly the same as the ones in Devtest Labs).
So I went over to Microsoft Flow, logged in and created a new flow with a Request node and a Send me a mobile notification node, like so:
To provide the required field bindings for the data sent as part of the web hook call, I pasted in to the Request input box the following schema:
{
"$schema": "http://json-schema.org/draft-04/schema#",
"properties": {
"delayUrl120": {
"type": "string"
},
"delayUrl60": {
"type": "string"
},
"eventType": {
"type": "string"
},
"guid": {
"type": "string"
},
"labName": {
"type": "string"
},
"owner": {
"type": "string"
},
"resourceGroupName": {
"type": "string"
},
"skipUrl": {
"type": "string"
},
"subscriptionId": {
"type": "string"
},
"text": {
"type": "string"
},
"vmName": {
"type": "string"
}
},
"required": [
"skipUrl",
"delayUrl60",
"delayUrl120",
"vmName",
"guid",
"owner",
"eventType",
"text",
"subscriptionId",
"resourceGroupName",
"labName"
],
"type": "object"
}
…and I then added the delayUrl60 link as the notification link.
This lets me conveniently postpone shutdown for an hour without having to log in to the portal (or anywhere else) – I just do it straight from my iPhone in a couple of taps (first the notification and then the link inside the Flow app), which is quick and easy enough to not break my flow.
A minor thing, I know, but so useful that I thought it needed more exposure.
Update: Here’s what it looks like on the phone. And yes, that’s a Douglas Adams reference:
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I haven’t written anything about the deep learning stuff I’ve been doing (just like I haven’t blogged about Kubernetes and other container-related stuff), but that might change in the future – I’ve been sticking to my Disclaimer, but I realize that there’s a lot I can actually write about, once I find the time to do it properly. ↩︎
