Did you know that the “Dev/Test Labs” service in Azure had a neat feature where you could schedule the shutdown of servers? No, or yes… Now this features has been integrated in all virtual machines. Nice!
So just go to the details blade of a virtual machine and click on the “Auto-Shutdown”-tile. Here you can enable / schedule a shutdown.
Via this method, you configure it per VM. You can always use Azure automation / runbooks and do it per resource groups.
Why do this? In Azure you are billed per minute for your compute runtime. So shutting down (and deallocating) will safe you a great bunch!
Karim Vaes 