EC2 startup on schedule

Question

I need to start up an EC2 instance at (say) 6am every day. The constraints are that I'd like to avoid having a computer running all day to do the startup or use a paid solution like ylastic's.

The solution at alestic, is the closest so far. The downside of this solution is that the startup time is high because of the time required to install custom software and to move around data.

Is there a way to just boot up an instance instead of creating a new instance each time as shown in this example?

Answer 1

You can now do this with Amazon OpsWorks. After you've set up the main stuff, just make a new instance and set its scaling type to "time-based" (you can't change this for some reason once the instance has been made):

Now, just click on the "Instances > Time-Based" category and setup the schedule: