Start google compute instance by schedule.

[Rafael Zubairov]

Hello! 

I need to run ETL like jobs in google compute engine.

The jobs itself compute intensive, and would require compute instances, downloading data from network, processing and then storing the data into google bigquery(other storage).

Referring article (https://cloud.google.com/solutions/reliable-task-scheduling-compute-engine) i need to run compute nodes all the time, though my load would happen only once a day.

Can i use gcloud/API to spin on/off google compute instances on cron trigger?

Are there any other possible ways of spinning several google compute nodes at the specific time, and then turn them off?

Thanks!

[Adam (Cloud Platform Support)]

I'll give an obligatory mention to Google Cloud Dataflow since you mention ETL, as this is the sort of thing it was designed for. It's worth taking a look at.

If you're just looking to manage compute engine instances programmatically, yes you can do this with the 'gcloud' commmand eg. from a shell script invoked from cron (see 'gcloud compute instances').