n8n Workflow: Schedule AWS ECS Office Hours + Teams Alerts

Keep your Amazon ECS cost under control—with office-hours scheduling and instant Microsoft Teams alerts

This n8n workflow automatically turns tagged Amazon ECS services on during office hours, scales them to zero at night, and posts clear status updates to Microsoft Teams. It also supports self-service restarts through an n8n Form for a limited duration.

What this workflow does

• Schedules runs on two time windows: 20:00 daily and 08:00 on weekdays—or when a user submits an n8n Form restart request.
• Discovers ECS services across the configured clusters, lists services, describes them with tags, and keeps only those tagged auto-schedule=office-hours.
• At 20:00: saves each running service’s desired count into the saved-desired-count tag, scales the service to 0, and posts a stop summary to a Microsoft Teams channel via incoming webhook.
• At 08:00 (weekdays): restores services from saved-desired-count, clears saved-desired-count and override-until, and posts a start summary to Teams.
• Restart requests (self-service): optionally prompts for a project, lets the requester choose stopped or already-overridden services and select a duration, sets override-until, scales selected services back to their saved desired count, and then waits.
• Health polling: polls Amazon ECS every 30 seconds until all selected services are healthy (or the max attempts is reached) and sends a ready/failure alert to Teams.
• Automatic switch-off: when the requested end time arrives, if it’s outside office hours and override-until still matches, it scales services back to 0, clears the override tag, and notifies Teams.

Use cases

• Reduce ECS spend by running workloads only during business hours.
• Provide developers an easy “turn it back on” option with controlled duration.
• Centralize operational visibility in Microsoft Teams for scheduled stops/starts and restart outcomes.

Technical details

• Amazon ECS service tagging strategy: auto-schedule=office-hours, saved-desired-count, and override-until.
• Microsoft Teams notifications via incoming webhook.
• n8n nodes/workflow building blocks: if, set, code, form, wait, switch.