For a long time the “household trolls” have been bugging me about setting up their own Minecraft server. I finally got around to do this the other day, using Microsoft Azure for the hosting. All is working great, but it left me with two challenges, namely making sure it is turned off then not used, so nothing is charged for it and making it possible for the kids to actually start it up, without annoying me or giving them access to my whole Azure subscription.
The following couple of blog posts will address how we dealt with these two items.
The first will look at setting up and using Azure Automation to create a small runbook to turn off the VM each night, should it have been left on.
The second will show how I created a small utility running in the taskbar, giving the status of the VM and allowing the user to turn a give VM on and off and just this VM. To do this we will use the Azure Management Libraries.
Stay tuned 🙂