Running an EC2 instance is easy.
Remembering to stop it when you are no longer using it is another story.
While experimenting with development environments, labs, prototypes, or tools running on Amazon EC2, it is very common to leave an instance running longer than necessary. Individually, those extra hours may not seem significant, but over time — especially when working with several instances or AWS accounts — they become unnecessary cloud costs.
That problem inspired me to build Cloud Control Panel.
Cloud Control Panel is an open-source, serverless control panel for managing Amazon EC2 instances, with a focus on automation, visibility, and reducing idle infrastructure costs.
The problem
Imagine you have an EC2 instance used only during development hours.
Maybe you use it from:
8:00 AM → 6:00 PM
But the instance stays online during the remaining 14 hours of the day.
If nobody needs that infrastructure overnight, keeping it running does not provide additional value.
A practical example is experimenting with tools such as Kiro Crew using EC2. The environment may be useful while you are actively developing, but there is usually no reason for that instance to continue running throughout the night.
Instead of relying on someone to manually stop and start it every day, the process can be automated.
That is one of the main ideas behind Cloud Control Panel.
What Cloud Control Panel does
From a centralized dashboard, users can manage their EC2 infrastructure and configure automations around it.
Current capabilities include:
- Scheduled EC2 startup and shutdown
- Multi-account management
- Multiple instance management
- Instance groups
- Notifications
- Uptime tracking
- Cost visibility
- Activity history
- Automated operations
The goal is to make everyday EC2 administration easier while helping avoid paying for resources that are sitting idle.
A serverless approach
I wanted the management platform itself to remain lightweight.
It would not make much sense to create infrastructure for saving EC2 costs while introducing another permanently running server to manage everything.
For that reason, Cloud Control Panel uses a serverless AWS architecture.
The current stack includes:
- AWS Lambda for backend logic
- Amazon API Gateway for APIs
- Amazon DynamoDB for application data
- Amazon EventBridge for scheduled automation
- Amazon S3 for static resources
- Amazon CloudFront for content delivery
- AWS IAM for permissions and security
- Amazon SNS for notifications
The architecture is designed so that the control layer remains simple, scalable, and inexpensive to operate.
How scheduled EC2 management works
A simplified workflow looks like this:
User
↓
Cloud Control Panel
↓
API Gateway
↓
AWS Lambda
↓
EC2
Scheduled actions
↓
Amazon EventBridge
↓
AWS Lambda
↓
Start / Stop EC2
Instead of manually connecting to the AWS Console every morning and evening, a user can define when an instance should be available.
For example:
Development EC2 Instance
Start: Monday–Friday at 8:00 AM
Stop: Monday–Friday at 7:00 PM
EventBridge handles the schedule and invokes the appropriate Lambda function, which performs the required EC2 operation.
Simple automation, but potentially very useful when repeated across several environments.
Multi-account management
Another goal of the project is to avoid having infrastructure scattered across different AWS accounts without a simple centralized view.
Cloud Control Panel is being designed to manage multiple accounts and multiple EC2 instances from the same interface.
This becomes useful for developers, small teams, labs, community projects, testing environments, or organizations that maintain separate AWS accounts for different workloads.
More than start and stop
Scheduling was the starting point, but the project is evolving toward a broader cloud automation platform.
Some of the areas being explored include:
- Better cost analytics
- More notification channels
- Advanced scheduling rules
- Additional EC2 automation
- Improved monitoring
- More AWS services
- Additional multi-account capabilities
Amazon EC2 is currently the primary focus, but the architecture leaves room for the project to expand.
Open source
Cloud Control Panel is completely open source.
One of my goals with the project is not only to build something useful, but also to create a space where other developers can contribute ideas and experiment with AWS technologies.
There are many ways to participate:
- Suggest a new feature
- Open an issue
- Improve the UI
- Add automation capabilities
- Improve documentation
- Review the architecture
- Submit a pull request
You can find the project here:
GitHub:
https://github.com/sebasgao05/cloud-control-panel
If you find the idea useful, consider leaving a ⭐ on the repository.
And if you have an idea for something Cloud Control Panel should automate next, contributions are welcome.
Final thoughts
Cloud optimization does not always require complex FinOps platforms.
Sometimes it starts with a very simple question:
Why is this resource running if nobody is using it?
Cloud Control Panel started from that question.
The objective is simple: automate repetitive cloud operations, improve visibility, and avoid paying for infrastructure we don't need.
There is still a lot to build, and that is exactly why I decided to make it open source.
Let's build it together.
Suggested DEV.to tags:
aws opensource serverless cloud
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