How to shutdown nodes in AWS Jira Data Center

[Chris Dunne _Raledo_]

I am using AWS Jira Data Center with the default configuration from the CloudFormation stack template. This has one node.

I am using this for testing only. I'd like to shut it down when not in use.

When I shut down the EC2 host for the Jira node, the auto scaling group automatically restarts it.

I've tried detaching it and also changing the min number of nodes in cluster from 1 to 0, but neither work.

Any ideas?

Thanks

Chris

[Steffen Opel _Utoolity_]

An Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling (AS) configuration has three relevant settings to manage capacity:

1. minimum size - AS ensures your group never goes below this size
2. maximum size - AS ensures your group never goes above this size
3. desired capacity - AS ensures that your group has this many instances (either because you manually set the value, or in case you have defined scaling policies, AS adjusts the desired capacity "within your minimum and maximum number of instances, based on the criteria that you specify")

The aws-quickstart/quickstart-atlassian-jira/.../quickstart-jira-dc.template.yaml CloudFormation template does not expose the desired capacity and has a default minimum and maximum size of 1, resulting in:

• detaching an instance does not alter the Auto Scaling group configuration, which is why AS starts a new instance when you cause it to be below its minimum size of 1
• terminating an instance has the same effect, causing AS to start a new instance to reach its minimum size of 1
• changing the minimum size to 0 does not automatically change the desired capacity, if there are no resp. scaling policies configured

Solution

You can easily achieve the desired outcome by setting both minimum and maximum size to 0, which will cause AWS to automatically reduce the desired capacity to 0 and terminate the instance.

Alternatively you can only set the minimum size to 0 and manually set the desired capacity of the Auto Scaling group to 0 as well (via the AWS console or AWS CLI).

Cheers,
Steffen