Manage Zombie Mode

Codiac's Zombie Mode lets you cut costs by using a schedule to turn workloads off and on automatically.

Overview

• Set a Zombie Mode schedule to turn environments off and on automatically.
• Cut direct and indirect costs.
• No install needed.

Cut direct costs

For example, many teams only use dev environments during the workday. You can set up Zombie Mode to automatically shut down these environments at night and restore them first thing in the morning. All you need to do is set up a schedule and apply it to the environment you want to manage.

For example, imagine you have five cabinets active on your account:

• dev_01
• dev_02
• demos
• sandbox
• prod

The teams which use dev_01, dev_02, and demos are only active during regular business hours.

You set up a Zombie Schedule for these cabinets:

• Workloads Off: 5 p.m. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.
• Workloads On: 7 a.m. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.

This saves you the cloud service provider costs for running these workloads on nights and weekends.

tip

We provide a "Nights & Weekends" Zombie Schedule template with this schedule. You can also create and customize your schedules.

Cut indirect costs

In addition to directly reducing costs for specific unused environments, using Zombie Mode helps reduce overall costs.

Codiac's default autoscaling means that when you use Zombie Mode to shut down an environment, the nodes allocated to that environment are deallocated.

For example, imagine your account is using 6-7 nodes to support five cabinets:

• dev_01
• dev_02
• demos
• sandbox
• prod

You use the "Nights & Weekends" template to automatically manage three cabinets (dev_01, dev_02, and demos).

The remaining two cabinets (sandbox and prod) only need 4-5 nodes. Zombie Mode's autoscaling automatically scales back your total number of nodes during the off hours.

How does it work?

No separate installation is needed.

Codiac automatically installs an agent on each cluster at the time of creation. This agent uses the Zombie Mode schedule to bring the pods down to zero for the given environment. The agent then spins the clusters back up to the given replica count per the schedule.

Codiac automatically enables autoscaling when clusters are created. This means the underlying nodes are also released when Zombie Mode kills pods.

Zombie State

If you try to access an ingressed service while its environment is in Zombie State, you receive a 503 error.

Enable Zombie Mode

info

Zombie Mode is scoped to the environment. It affects all the cabinets inside the environment you choose.

1. Click the Zombie Mode button to open the Zombie Mode Scheduler.

2. The Zombie Mode Scheduler pop-up appears.

3. Click and drag to change the schedule times. Zombie Mode turns your workloads off during the pink blocks.

4. Click SCHEDULE TEMPLATES to open the templates menu.

1. Click NIGHTS AND WEEKENDS to apply this template to your schedule. You can also create and save custom templates.

6. When you are happy with your schedule, click Save and Close to save it and close the pop-up.

Disable Zombie Mode

1. Click Delete event to disable a scheduled Zombie Mode session.

tip

Delete all the scheduled Zombie Mode sessions to completely disable Zombie Mode for your environment.

2. Click Save and close to save your changes and close the pop-up.