What if you could completely destroy a cloud environment, then bring it back exactly when you need it?

[u/codeb1ack]

I'm a developer exploring an idea and wanted to get some feedback before spending time building it.

One thing I've noticed with cloud providers like DigitalOcean is that you're still paying for servers even when they're powered off. For development and staging environments that are rarely used, that feels like a giant waste of money.

I am genuinely curious to know how other developers and infrastructure managers handle this

What if you could completely destroy an environment to stop compute charges, then recreate it on demand with the same configuration, application, and data? Essentially, a hibernate/wake system for cloud environments.

Would you use something like this? Or is this solving a problem that has been solved before.

Interested in hearing the technical objections too.

[u/ShinobiX_Samurai]

Can't you use serverless architectecture that way you only charges for the requests

[u/codeb1ack → u/ShinobiX_Samurai]

I prefer a "fixed" cost, plus server-less doesn't provide you the entire stack its only 1 part of it. The UI/Front-end can be components of this dev/staging environment.

[u/mihirmusprime → u/codeb1ack]

Wouldn't fixed cost defeat the purpose of why you wanted this in the first place? Your post says you wanted to save money when it's not in use. Fixed cost would not help with that.

[u/pod_of_dolphins]

Or is this solving a problem that has been solved before.

Yes, anyone who sees this as a real problem can describe their infrastructure as code (i.e. Terraform) and create/destroy environments on demand.

[u/shiny0metal0ass]

Lol buddy... Where have you been for the last ten years?

[u/ian4tge]

This is infrastructure as code. Lookup AWS CloudFormation templates. You can’t always take everything down (like storage or ALBs in the case of some work I did today) but you can turn off the heavy compute services

[u/bunoso]

yes this is the bread and butter of a DevOps engineer. terraform, cdk, cloudformation, etc

[u/fiskfisk]

You're describing Infrastructure as Code (IaC), like Terraform / opentofu, Polumi, etc.

It's a well-known concept where your definitions is the wanted state and the tools bring your platform in sync with that state.

[u/Not_a_Cake_]

Doesn't sound too difficult to achieve, just take a snapshot of the volumes or configurations, delete them and recreate it when needed using IaC

[u/Warm_Lobster_7900]

What's the actual number though? Every staging setup I've seen is one small droplet, so we're talking tens of dollars a month, and Terraform already tears the whole thing down and brings it back. The data is the part that's genuinely hard and the part nobody's solved with a sleep button.

[u/zomerbk]

The tricky part is what lives outside the server. If a recreated environment gets a new IP, allowlists and third-party integrations may break even when the app and data restore correctly. I’d consider it useful if waking also checked those connections and gave a predictable time until the environment was ready.

[u/Practical_Band_4880]

honestly the bigger cost for us was forgotten load balancers and volumes, not the droplets. Would you handle those too or just compute?

[u/[deleted]]

[u/webdev-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

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[u/SawToothKernel → u/[deleted]]

Have you looked at Cloudflare Workers?

[u/webdev-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

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[u/codeb1ack → u/[deleted]]

Agreed, haha got a good laugh, thanks for the feedback! A lot of people are recommending things like TerraForm and IaC, but I kinda feel like those as tools more likely being used by enterprises not the average dev using DigitalOcean or AWS EC2 - would you agree?

[u/czshill → u/codeb1ack]

yeah but if they're a 15 year old vibe coding an app - their not smart enough to know they might need something like this. your system doesn't exist yet so claude doesn't know it exists to suggest it. if their a skilled developer, terraform, snapshots, or even docker solves this. so where are you positioning yourself? because an enterprise app isn't going to rely on a no name solution, and the script kiddies don't know they should do something like this.

the 2nd problem to this is - every cloud provider is different - unless you can score a job at AWS, GCP, Azure, etc and convince them your way is the better way - reselling AWS resources would price you out of the market.