Google Cloud Supported Services

NightOps supports scheduling for Google Cloud compute services.

Supported Services

Compute Engine VMs

Stop and start Compute Engine virtual machines on schedule. All persistent disks and configuration are preserved. External IPs may change unless you use static IPs.

Standard and custom machine types
Preemptible VMs are supported but may be terminated by Google
Instances in managed instance groups (handled separately)

Cloud SQL Instances

Stop and start Cloud SQL database instances. All data is preserved. Unlike AWS RDS, Google Cloud SQL does not have a maximum stop period.

MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server
Single-zone and high-availability configurations
Read replicas stop automatically with the primary

Cloud Run Services

Scale Cloud Run services to zero instances during off-hours. Since Cloud Run scales to zero by default, this is primarily useful for services configured with minimum instances.

GKE Node Pools

Scale GKE node pools to zero nodes during off-hours. Your cluster control plane remains running. This works with both Standard and Autopilot clusters (for Standard mode node pools).

Managed Instance Groups

Set managed instance group target size to zero during off-hours and restore to your configured size when needed.

Quick Start

Label your resources: Add nightops-managed: true to any resources you want NightOps to manage.
Set up a Service Account: Create a service account with the required IAM roles.
Connect your project: Add your GCP project in the NightOps dashboard using the service account key or Workload Identity.
Create a schedule: Define when your resources should be running.

Labeling Best Practices

We recommend using consistent labels across your resources:

Label	Value	Purpose
`nightops-managed`	`true`	Required for NightOps to manage the resource
`nightops-environment`	`dev`, `staging`, etc.	Group resources by environment
`nightops-production`	`true`	Protect resource from any scheduled operations

Pricing Impact

When NightOps stops your GCP resources, you stop paying for compute. You continue to pay for:

Persistent disks attached to stopped Compute Engine VMs
Cloud SQL storage while instances are stopped
GKE cluster management fee (fixed cost regardless of nodes)
Static external IP addresses not attached to running resources

Next Step

Set up the required IAM permissions: Google Cloud IAM Policy →